Articulation Defects in Autistics Children’s Speech

The problem of autism is wide spreading nowadays all over the world. The paper has tackled one of the main problems of autistic children that is poor pronunciation. This paper tries to figure out the reasons behind the pronunciation problems of autistic children and how to deal with such problems. The main objectives of the study are to find out the meaning of autism in general, stating the main symptoms of autistic children, specifying the problem of articulation and proposing the suitable ways of treatment to improve the autistic children’s articulation. The data of the study consists of a recorded speech of nine students in the Hama’em Al Salam Centre for the treatment of autistic children. A form has been designed for this purpose to identify the specific articulation problems of those autistic children. The data have been recorded along one year of observation. After analyzing the data, the researcher has reached a conclusion that the reasons behind those problems in articulation are psychological ones which make the child does not want to exert extra effort to pronounce the words correctly, this is why they apply certain processes to make their speech less effortful such as deletion, substitution, assimilation or distortion. The paper proposes some solution to solve this problem of autistic children in order to make their speech as normal as possible. Key words: Autism, articulation, distortion, substitution, deletion, defects.