Speech Therapy Services

Speech Therapy Services

Our speech-language pathologists work with families to address various communication impairments.  Early Intervention, especially where language delay is involved, works best when the following techniques are learned, used, and established:

• Joint Attention Skills: When looking at pictures, reading books, or even just playing with children, especially those with, decreased vocabulary, it is important that the child engages or attends to an object, picture, or toy that the caregiver is talking about. This ensures that the child is listening and is able to receptively understand the object or picture being labeled and described.
• Turn-Taking: This is teaching children to respond to physical and verbal cues, which helps set the stage for adequate communicative exchange in which there is a speaker and a listener. For example, if the parent pushes the car to the child and says “vroom-vroom”, the parent waits for the child to respond by pushing the toy car back to them and imitating the sound. Some children need to be taught this skill explicitly to establish meaningful communicative exchange.
• Language Stimulation: The caregiver or care providers follows the child’s lead during play or in everyday activities and responds to the child’s actions by saying out loud what they are doing such as naming the item they are manipulating, talking about the action the child is performing with the object, and describing the physical characteristics of the object. All this is done while not requiring the child to respond or to say a specific word or sentence. Only stimulating their language and providing them with temptation to talk.
• Play Skills: how children discover and learn about objects, people and the world around them. Through play, children often show us what they understand about the world. Play is a good skill to teach speech and language concepts relevant to children’s everyday life, which will help them to become better communicators.

Your child may benefit from Speech Therapy if he/she experiences any of the following:

• You or other people have difficulty understanding your child.
• Your infant/toddler is not babbling/playing with sounds or trying to imitate you.
• People think your child is younger than they actually are because of the way s/he speaks.
• Your child is being teased or shows frustration because of the way s/he talks.
• Your child uses fewer words than other children of his/her age.
• Your child stutters or produces speech with many stops and starts.
• Your child’s interactions or play seem unusual or inappropriate when compared with peers.
• Your child struggles with reading, writing, and/or spelling.
• There is a diagnosis that could affect speech or language such as hearing loss, auditory processing disorder, autism spectrum disorder, or developmental delay.

Contact our office to schedule an evaluation with one of our skilled Speech Therapists.