How/why do speech impediments happen?
In: Biology
As other posters have said, there are many reasons. Most developmental speech sound disorders are not caused by any physical problem (e.g. cleft palate, hearing loss). It’s kind of like asking why do some children have learning disabilities? It is just a combination of their genetic make-up and possibly external factors during their upbringing. We know that many times children with speech sound disorders also have deficits in other skills, such as phonemic awareness (i.e. the ability to break down words into their constituent parts, like c-a-t and also blending sounds together to form a whole word). Phonemic awareness is very important for early reading/writing so it is not uncommon for children with speech sound disorders to have reading difficulties. Sometimes these disorders can just be considered a developmental delay and the child is progressing along the normal trajectory, just at a slower rate than most children. Other times they may have errors or patterns of errors that are atypical which are more of a red flag that recovery may take longer. Also, if a child has strong language skills (i.e. age-appropriate vocabulary/syntax/comprehension), they are more likely to recover faster from delayed speech articulation skills (i.e. pronouncing certain sounds incorrectly). Hope that helps!
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