Almost 10% of young children have a speech sound disorder, according to the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. These can results in difficulties producing speech sounds correctly and often have no known cause.
Since COVID-19, SLPs have watched this statistic grow, causing more families to seek support for their children’s difficulties producing speech sounds.
“So many more kindergarteners have started to be diagnosed with speech sound disorders than before the pandemic,” said Brosseau-Lapré, of associate professor of speech in Purdue University Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences. “A lot of school-based SLPs are reporting that the children who are coming to them have a lot more speech and language difficulties than they used to.”
According to Brosseau-Lapré, many of these problems “tend to have to do with phonological processing,” which is the ability to understand and manipulate the different sound components and may not improve on their own. “We think those phonological processing difficulties are also at the root of a lot of dyslexia.”
Read the full article at here: https://www.purdue.edu/hhs/news/2025/05/purdue-researcher-among-first-to-explore-childrens-language-abilities-in-relation-to-speech-sound-disorder/