Articulation Development - Is my kid normal?

I get a lot of questions from parents, caregivers, and relatives asking if their child's speech is normal.  The simple truth is, there is a wide range of normal and every single child falls in a slightly different place on that spectrum.  There are some guidelines you can follow though.  Most children acquire certain sounds at around the same age.  Norms are calculated by these trends, and a sound is considered delayed when a child is passes the age where 85% of children have acquired a given sound without having the sound in their repertoire.  That sounds complicated, so I'll give you an example.

Bryce is 4 years old, and consistently substitutes the /d/ sound for the /g/ sound when he speaks ("dog" sounds like "dod" and "grandma" sounds like "drandma"). 90% of children acquire the /g/ sound consistently by 3 years old.  This means Bryce's errors would be considered a delay.

Here's a handy chart that gives the broad ranges of normal for articulation development, taken from the Goldman-Fristoe Test of Articulation 2nd Edition (a test I use frequently to evaluate articulation).

Articulation delays and disordered sounds can happen for any number of reasons (or what seems like no reason at all).  Some errors happen consistently as kids are learning to talk are classified as phonological processes.  They usually follow a pattern rather than being very phoneme-specific like Bryce's error above.  We'll talk more about phonological processes next week.

I hope this handy chart is helpful.  And, as always, I wish you and yours the very best in becoming better communicators every day!