The purpose of this study was to compare the phonological processing abilities (PPA) between children with speech sound disorder (SSD) and typically developing children (TD) in early elementary school years, and to examine phonological processing abilities according to subtypes of SSD. Methods: The participants were 32 children with SSD and 21 typically developing children in the first to the third grades. Children with SSD were divided into children with articulation disorders, phonological delays, and phonological disorders. The tasks for PPA consisted of (1) phonological awareness (PA) tests at syllable and phoneme levels, (2) phonological memory (PM) tests including non-word repetition (NWR), digit forward recall (DF), and digit backward recall (DB), and (3) rapid automatized naming (RAN) tests conducted by numbers and letters. Results: Children with SSD and TD showed significant differences in NWR. As a result of examining the PPA among subgroups of SSD, children with phonological disorders showed significantly lower performance in the NWR and the RAN than children with articulation disorders. Also, children with phonological delays and phonological disorders showed significantly lower performance in the DB task than children with articulation disorders. Conclusion: Significant differences were found between children with SSD and TD in NWR task among the PPA tasks, suggesting the clinical usefulness of the NWR task. This study suggests that children with SSD form a heterogeneous group who differ in terms of involvement of other aspects of speech processing model.

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