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It is generally agreed that the auditory perception skills of children with developmental language disorders are more limited than those of typically developing children. It is not easy to determine exactly how the capacity to discriminate and the capacity to pronounce phonemes influence each other in children with language disorders. For most authors, the inability to discriminate certain phonemes accurately causes a developmental delay in pronunciation, whereas others claim the influence is mutual. The aim of this study is to determine in which consonants perceptive difficulty is more likely to occur and in which cases there is a greater probability of difficulty when it comes to articulating them. The sample used in the study consisted of 86 children with a mean age of 4 years and 7 months. The phonological processes involved in simplifying speech were identified. Their errors were used as the basis on which to construct and apply a specific speech perception test. The relationship between the articulatory and perceptive skills of children with substitutive processes were analysed by means of two comparisons: first, in all the processes detected taken as a whole and, second, in the three most frequent substitutive processes. These analyses were carried out to determine whether the nature of the consonant implied a greater probability of perceptive difficulty. The findings provide information about a relation between the articulatory and perceptive skills, and about whether the nature of the consonant determines a higher probability of perceptive or articulatory difficulties. These results can be of value in the assessment, design and effectiveness of speech therapy programmes.

Introduction: Phonological analysis is a system for assessing children's speech that was introduced by Ingram in 1976. Despite being acknowledged as one of the essential elements for understanding speech therapy intervention in speech disorders, it is not a wholly generalised practice due to the difficulties involved and the shortage of standardised instruments for performing it., Development: Here, we examine the impact of phonological analysis on speech therapy intervention and the history of the instruments that have been developed over the years to perform it, both in English and in Spanish. The basic procedure for carrying out this kind of analysis is explained and we also present a software application that allows it to be performed automatically., Conclusions: We recommend making phonological analysis to assess children with language disorders a more widespread practice and also increasing the planning of adequate intervention programmes.

Introduction: A careful analysis of the mistakes made by children with learning disabilities in writing reveals a number of qualitatively distinct errors, each of which is directly related to one of the fundamental processes underlying the ability to spell correctly, that is to say, perceptive-linguistic, metalinguistic, operative memory and long-term memory processes, among others. The objective of this study is to describe our proposal for a methodology for treating children with orthography learning difficulties that takes these processes into account., Development: A thorough analysis of the orthographic mistakes and their semiological classification is taken as our starting point, and we then put forward a sequence of instruction for each kind of error that tackles the deficient psycholinguistic processes, offsets the weaker points of the processing with the stronger points, and aims to get the child to learn a large number of words, thus favouring the metacognitive and self-regulatory processes applied to writing., Conclusions: Teaching pupils with dyslexic and dysorthographic problems to spell and write correctly entails important methodological difficulties. In our clinical practice we have attempted to develop teaching processes that fit the semiological characteristics of the spelling errors by trying to modify both the pupil's actual academic performance and the psycholinguistic processes that underlie such errors.

Introduction: Verbal dyspraxia is a specific developmental language disorder that is characterised by a deficit at different levels of speech processing: in phonological planning, in phonetic planning and in the implementation of the speech motor programme., Development: In this study we review the criteria for differential diagnosis, the tests that are useful to achieve this and the possible lines of speech therapy treatment.

The aim of this study is to present a survey of speech therapy intervention in phonological disorders (PD). We will examine the concepts of normal phonological development and those involved in PD in order to understand how they have been dealt with, historically, in speech therapy intervention. Lastly, we will describe how evaluation and intervention are carried out from the speech processing paradigm. Phonetic phonological skills allow people to decode the phonic strings they hear so as to be able to gain access to their phonological form and meaning. These abilities also enable them to encode these strings from lexical representations to pronounce words. The greater part of their development takes place during approximately the first four years of life. Speech processing difficulties affect the phonetic phonological skills and occur throughout almost all language pathologies, although the effect they exert is not always the same. This can range from a lack of the capacity to speak to important problems of intelligibility or mild problems with certain phonemes. Their influence on learning to read and write has been shown in recent decades. Speech therapy intervention began from a model based on articulatory phonetics. In the 70s a linguistic model based on the process of speech simplification and phonological analysis was added and this gave rise to a marked improvement in the systems used for evaluation and intervention. At present we have assumed a psycholinguistic model that links the perceptive skills with productive ones and top-down or bottom-up processing (from lexical representations to perception or production of phonemes and vice-versa).