Speech Therapy

Autism Spectrum Disorder (“ASD”) : a complex developmental disorder that varies in severity of speech. Children who have ASD can have mild or severe speech and communication difficulties. Speech therapy can help a child with ASD with verbal communication skills, but also with body language communication, social skills, conversational skills and prosody or expression and inflection in speech. Children with ASD who are non-verbal can also benefit from speech therapy through devices and technologies known as Alternative/Augmentative Communication (“AAC”), including sign language, picture exchange communication system (“PECS”), through the use of technology such as tablets, and through speech output devices.

Dysarthria: a motor speech disorder resulting in weakened speech muscles making it difficult or impossible to move the muscles in order to have coherent speech. As a result, speech sounds slurred, slow or like the individual is mumbling. Unlike aphasia, dysarthria is more likely to affect a child’s speech; however, aphasia is more likely to affect a child’s ability to understand language. Dysarthria is common in older adults who suffered from stroke or Parkinson’s disease or multiple sclerosis, but can also impact children from a traumatic brain injury or cerebral palsy. In addition, children may have dysarthria after suffering from trauma to their face, mouth, or tongue. Symptoms of dysarthria include issues with chewing, issues with swallowing, difficulty setting volume of one’s voice, and difficulty controlling muscles in their face. Speech therapists provide targeted therapies to strengthen weakened speech muscles, increase muscle movement, help articulate sounds and words, increase breathing in order to allow for louder speech.

Language Disorder : a disorder that hinders a child’s use, processing and understanding of language as well as vocabulary, reading, structures of sentences, written language and sentence structure. There are two types of language disorder, and children can have a single type or both types: 1) expressive language disorder in which children may have difficulty with new words, organizing sentence structure, and communicating their wants or needs; and 2) receptive language disorder in which children struggle to comprehend the meaning of sentences and words heard. Speech therapy targets a child’s specific communication deficiencies to provide therapies, including using play therapy to allow a child to comfortably use language and speech in an informal setting and practicing asking basic questions.

Social Communication Disorder : a disorder characterized by the inability of difficulty in following social rules or conversational cues. Children with social communication disorder struggle to effectively communicate in social settings. For example, they may not use greetings, or constantly interrupt a speaker. Unlike Autism Spectrum Disorder, social communication disorder refers only to this social communication; whereas autism involves many other symptoms. Speech therapy can help a child learn the social rules for communication with orders, the appropriate cues and to better understand verbal and non-verbal communication.

Speech Sound Disorder : an inability to correctly pronounce certain sounds. Most children grow out of mispronunciations; however, when these difficulties remain, parents should seek an assessment by a speech therapist. There are functional speech sound disorders in which the cause is unknown. There are also organic speech sounds disorders in which a cause is known. Organic speech sound disorders can be caused by structural differences, such as a cleft lip or palate; or through sensory disorders like inability to hear how words or sounds are pronounced; or through motor speech issues when speech muscles are weakened. Speech therapy can help children through many different therapies, including doing preventative exercises in order for the disorder not to worsen, and providing education on how the correct sound should be made with physical demonstration.