Abstract: Objective To explore the clinical characteristics of lateral misarticulation. Methods 39 patients with lateral misarticulation were recruited. Their articulation was recorded by the computer speech lab according to the Putonghua syllable chart of the collocation of consonants and vowels, then the recording materials were analyzed. Results 22 cases with lateral misarticulation were on both sides, 14 cases were on the right side and 3 cases on the left side. Lateral misarticulation mainly occurred in consonants with the highest incidence in /z/, / c/, /s/, /zh/, /ch/, /sh/, /j/, /q/ and /x/. There were two or more release bursts in the spectrogram of lateral misarticulation. There was no significant correlation between the number of lateral misarticulation and age (r=0.110, P=0.507). Conclusion Lateral misarticulation mainly occurs in supradental, blade-palatal and lingua-palatal phoneme. The time-domain waveform diagram and spectrogram are helpful for the diagnosis of lateral misarticulation. Lateral misarticulation should be corrected in time.

Key words: dysarthria, lateral misarticulation, consonants