If you’re an SLP, you’ve probably had this moment mid-eval where you’re like… wait, is this artic- or phonological? And also, do I even care?
Honestly, yeah. It does end up mattering.
Articulation issues are the more straightforward ones. It’s about how the sound is physically produced. So you’re hearing distortions, weird substitutions, maybe omissions, but it’s tied to motor stuff. The classic examples are your lateral /s/ kids or that one /r/ that just refuses to cooperate no matter what you do.
Phonological disorders are a different story. That’s when you start seeing patterns. Not just one-off errors, but systems. Fronting, stopping, cluster reduction, those kinds of things where the child is applying a rule across multiple sounds.
Where this really hits is in therapy. If it’s articulation, you’re probably doing a lot of cueing, placement work, drilling, all the things. Mirrors, models, repetition… and sometimes it feels like slow progress, especially with certain sounds. Looking at you, /r/.
But if it’s phonological, you’re thinking bigger picture. You’re not just fixing a sound. You’re trying to shift a pattern. That’s when you pull out minimal pairs or cycles or multiple oppositions. And when it works, it can actually move pretty fast.
Of course, real life is never that clean. You get kids who are kind of both. Or errors that look phonological but don’t respond like you’d expect. That’s where you end up relying on your judgment, and sometimes just trying something and seeing what sticks.
Getting it wrong can slow you down, too. If you treat a phonological kid like it’s articulation, you can spend forever on individual sounds without much carryover. And if a kid actually needs motor-based work but you go all in on a phonological approach, they might not ever really get the sound down.
It also changes how you explain things to teachers and parents. Saying “they can’t say /k/ and /g/” is one thing. Saying “they’re fronting, so it affects a whole group of sounds” gives a completely different picture.
At the end of the day, it’s not about the label itself. It’s just about picking the approach that’s actually going to help the kid make progress.
Author: Camryn Harwick, M.S., CCC-SLP
