Children's Center for Development & Behavior

Speech Language Pathology

Every Child should be able to express their needs, wants and feelings.

Effective communication can shape a child’s world. The inability to express needs, wants or feelings can create avoidance to initiate communication.

The inability to communicate can cause poor self-esteem in children and creates high levels of frustration for both the parent and child.

Speech-Language Therapy provides an opportunity for your child to engage in one-on-one interventions so he/she can learn to vocalize his/her needs.

Speech-Language Therapy combined with Applied Behavior Analysis will enhance the overall effectiveness of your child’s individualized intervention plan. This will provide your child with a well-rounded multi-disciplinary approach towards interventions.

Speech-Language Therapy:
Customized interventions specific to your child’s needs

There are many components that make up the speech-language therapy process. We combine the right mix to target your child’s specific needs.

Receptive and Expressive language are basic elements addressed in the Speech-Language therapy process. Receptive language is the understanding of sounds, words, phrases, questions, directions, stories and conversation. Expressive language is the ability to use parts of speech (nouns, verbs, pronouns, adjectives) to express wants/needs, ask/answer questions, and express ideas.

Pragmatic skills are a key component of language development. In speech therapy “social language” is taught and reinforced through games and social routines.

Pragmatics involves skill development in the following areas: eye contact, turn taking initiating, maintaining, termination interactions and following rules and social expectations.

Oral-motor therapy can provide the mobility needed for speech clarity. To produce intelligible speech, a child should have strength and range of motion (ROM) in the following oral musculature: jaw, lips, cheeks and tongue. Apraxia is a neurologically based speech disorder characterized by a decrease in motor planning. Oral-motor therapy can benefit children with this condition.

Speech-language pathologists also work as a key member of any feeding therapy team. Every child needs to be nutritionally stable in order to benefit from educational and therapeutic interventions. The origin of feeding difficulties are varied. Your SLP will assist in identifying the etiology of feeding difficulties and put together a program to improve your child's dietary intake.