Phonetic/Phonological Disorder

Phonological disorder is the inappropriate production of sound together (in a word, sentence, etc.) that can be observed within normal vocabulary and grammar. This disorder refers to speech difficulties in children who do not have altered other linguistic abilities (it does not occur at the articulatory level since they can pronounce words well in imitation but within their spontaneous language they replace or omit them), it occurs at the perceptual and organizational level, that is, in auditory discrimination processes, affecting the conceptualization mechanisms of sounds and the relationship between signifier and meaning (they have no mental representation of sound).

Children with phonological disorders, in their spontaneous language, cannot correctly locate sounds because they do not have a good understanding of the contrasts between the different sounds. They do not differentiate words that can only be distinguished by a clear sound, whose contrast has not been learned, making semantic errors.