Phonological skills of a native Nepali speaking preschooler with developmental speech sound disorder

Abstract

Speech sound disorder (SSD) is a common developmental difficulty in children, yet its manifestation in Nepali remains underexplored. Owing to the language’s unique phonological structure, including retroflex–dental contrasts, aspirated stops, and rhotic trills or flaps, speech errors are expected to differ from those reported in English. This case study describes the phonological profile of a 5;0-year-old Nepali-speaking child with SSD. Speech samples were collected through picture naming and sentence imitation tasks (152 tokens, 98 words), transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), and analyzed for error patterns, stimulability, consistency, whole-word accuracy, and intelligibility. The child’s speech revealed a systematic but restricted phonological system: the rhotic/r/ was consistently replaced by (/rukʰ/“tree” → [lukʰ],/ɡʱar/“house”→[ɡʱal]); retroflexes were neutralized into dentals (/t̠opi/“cap”→[t̪opi],/t̠ʰulo/“big” →[t̪ulo]); and velars were substituted by dental counterparts (/kamila/“ant”→[t̪amila],/kʰarajo/“hare”→[t̪arayo]). None of these sounds were stimulable despite repeated cueing, with 85% consistency in errors, whole-word accuracy of 0.68, and connected-speech intelligibility rated 3/5. These results indicate a systematic reorganization of the phonological system, marked by the loss of major contrasts and reduced intelligibility. The lack of stimulability highlights the need for direct motor-based therapy, while the findings emphasize the importance of developing Nepali-specific assessment frameworks for accurate diagnosis and intervention.