Speech and Language Therapy

Your child has difficulty understanding language. This may include difficulty with:

• Following directions
• Identifying objects and actions
• Answering questions
• Understanding age-appropriate language concepts (grammar, phonetics, ect)

Your child has difficulty expressing themselves. This may include difficulty with:

• Using appropriate sentences (including length, grammar, vocabulary, ect)
• Labeling items and actions
• Using descriptive language
• Being understood by others 

Autism Spectrum Disorder is a neurological and developmental disorder that causes a person to have :

• Restricted/repetitive behaviors 
• Social skills challenges
• Communication difficulties

Autism Spectrum Disorder must be diagnosed by a medical professional. 

**If you have concerns please call for additional information/referrals for a full Autism Evaluation **

Your child has difficulty with specific sounds or patterns of sounds. This may include difficulty with:

• Production of specific sounds in isolation, words, or sentences  
• Production of errors that appear in certain parts of words (i.e deletion of sounds at the end of words)
• Being understood when producing words, sentences or in conversation by familiar and unfamiliar people  

Your child appears to know what they want to say, but has difficulty producing the correct movement pattern to create the word. This may include difficulty with:

• Production of consonant and vowel patterns
• Producing words/phrases consistently
• imitating sounds/words
• imitating mouth movements

Hearing is an essential and integral part of speech and language development. Whether your child has hearing aids, a cochlear implant, or had a temporary hearing loss, speech therapy can help your child with the following: 

• The ability to discriminate similar sounding sounds
• Improve articulation
• Aid development in any receptive or expressive language difficulties due to your child's hearing loss. 

Hearing loss must be diagnosed by an audiologist or Ear, Nose, Throat (ENT) doctor. 

**If you have concerns please call for additional information/referrals for a full hearing evaluation**

Your child has difficulty with skills that are needed for higher level language functions, especially  skills required in school. This may include difficulty with:

• Attention to tasks
• Organization of thoughts
• Initiation and planning of tasks
• Memory 

Your child has difficulty with understanding and/or implementing social skills that allow them to make and maintain friendships. This may include difficulty with:

• Basic conversational rules
• Flexibility to accept others ideas
• Identifying and understanding emotions and facial expressions
• Being able to filter thoughts and ideas to convey appropriate content to others  

Your child's vocal quality has changed or does not sound "normal" for a prolonged period of time. The change in vocal quality cannot be linked to a specific event or illness. Characteristics your child may exhibit include:

• Hypernasality
• Hyponasialty
• Low volume/loss of voice
• Raspy/harsh voice
• inappropriate pitch 
• Frequent pitch breaks 

Your child has difficulty producing speech in a fluent manner

Stuttering is characterized by unnatural and involuntary "disfleunceis" These include:

• Repetitions of sounds in words
• Blocks during words/sentences
• Prolongation of sounds in words

Cluttering is characterized by a fast rate of speech, irregular rhythm or prosody of speech, and poor use of grammar. 

Though verbal communication is always the final goal, sometimes children will need another type of device or system to communicate short term or long term. This can include low tech systems, such as pictures and word boards to high tech systems that will be your child's "voice," often referred to as a "talker." Evaluations and trials to find an appropriate system for your child is available if deemed necessary.