Articulatory disorders in speech among Finnish-speaking students according to age, sex, and speech therapy.

A group of Finnish-speaking students (n = 451) was examined clinically to study occurrence of articulatory disorders in speech, controlling for the possible effects of age, sex, and previous speech therapy. Distortions of the /s/ sound were found in 16%, of the /r/ sound in 3%, and of the /l/, /n/, or /d/ sounds in about 1% of the subjects; the rarest faultily produced sounds were usually combined with other articulatory disorders. According to fitted log-linear functions, age and sex were not related to prevalence of articulatory disorders in speech among young adults, while there was a tendency for subjects with previous speech therapy to have higher frequencies of articulatory disorders of /s/ and /r/ sounds than subjects with no such treatment, suggesting that exclusion of the treated subjects would have resulted in too low a prevalence of articulatory disorders in the sample.