Background and purpose: Speech sound disorders are the most common speech disorders in children which are associated with other problems and can lead to social problems, attention deficit and academic skills challenges. The aim of this study was to investigate articulation characteristics, phonological awareness and language skills in children with speech sound disorders.

Materials and methods: In a descriptive analytical study 24 children with speech sound disorder and 16 normal children were participated. The patients were selected from speech therapy clinics and the controls were chosen from nurseries based on convenience sampling. Speech production, oromotor and language skills were assessed by P-DEAP, TOLD-P3 and Phonological Awareness Test, respectively. Data was analyzed in SPSS ver. 20 using independent-samples t-test.

Results: There were significant differences between the two groups in phonological awareness skills (except blending phonemes (P= 0.2)), syntax (P=0.002), semantic (P=0.009), spoken language (P=0.003), listening (P=0.002), organizing (P=0.004), and speaking (P=0.02).

Conclusion: Children with speech sound disorders had atypical errors demonstrating weaker performance in language skills such as syntax, semantic, and phonological awareness compared to normal children. According to this study despite evaluating speech production it is necessary to assess language skills and phonological awareness in children with speech sound disorders.