Articulation

Having difficulty understanding your child? Does he/she have difficulty producing specific sounds? In articulation therapy we provide services for sound distortions, omissions, and deletions. PROMPT therapy techniques are frequently used during articulation therapy.

Articulation therapy can help with:

• Childhood Apraxia of Speech

• Speech Sound Disorders

• Limited Intelligibility

Early Intervention

Is your child's language not keeping pace with his/her peers? We provide early intervention for toddlers and early preschoolers through play-based therapy. We work to expand utterance length, vocabulary, and overall communication abilities.

School-Aged Language

Is your child struggling with academic expressive/receptive language in school? In school-aged language therapy, we target all aspects of language demands used by children daily including: preliteracy skills, phonological awareness, syntax, morphology, reading comprehension, and narrative writing.

AAC (Augmentative and alternative communication)

Does your child  require the use of assistive technology to facilitate language? Augmentative/alternative communication is helpful for individuals demonstrating impairments in gestural, spoken, and/or written modalities. Augmentative and alternative communication can both assist and/or take the place of verbal language.

AAC that is frequently used in therapy includes:

• PECS (picture exchange communication system)

• Proloquo2Go

• Go Talk

• Touch Chat

• LAMP

Social Communication and Pragmatics

Does your child struggle with connecting to peers or attending in school? In therapy targeting pragmatics, we will target eye contact, attending to activities, social organization, hidden social rules, identifying emotions, and engaging with peers both socially and academically.

RECEPTIVE LANGUAGE

Receptive language is our ability to understand spoken language. When a child has difficulty understanding language, we say they are having difficulty with receptive language. Children can exhibit both delays and/or disorders of receptive language skills (e.g., difficulty following directions).

Articulation and/phonology

Articulation is our ability to produce speech sounds using the mouth, lips, and tongue. If a child is having difficulty with articulation they can distort sounds. For example, if a child produces the phoneme /s/ and air is coming out the sides of the mouth they might say “she” for the word “sea”. Phonology is a rule based system and has patterns. Children who have phonological delays or disorders consistently produce errors in a pattern based way (e.g., “cat” becomes “tat” and “kite” becomes “tite”).

EXPRESSIVE LANGUAGE

Expressive language is our ability to use spoken language. When a child has difficulty expressing themselves, we say they are having difficulty with expressive language. Children can exhibit both delays and/or disorders of expressive language skills (e.g., labeling, requesting, and answering questions).

Play

Demonstration of play exhibits children’s knowledge of the world. Current research links play to development of cognitive, social, emotional, language, and literacy abilities. There are two different phases of play (e.g., presymbolic and symbolic). During the stages of development children will explore toys and objects to expand their play skills and increase their overall cognitive and linguistic skills.

Westby, C. (2000). A scale for assessing children's play.

LANGUAGE LITERACY

Language Literacy focuses on reading and writing which are language skills. When children have difficulty reading and writing they may have problems understanding others and using words well because of their learning disability. Children who have difficulty with reading or writing will also have difficulty with phonological awareness skills (e.g., grapheme/phoneme correspondence, rhyming, segmenting, and blending sounds).

Augmentative and Alternative Communication

AAC is used when children have difficulty solely relying on verbal communication and/or are non-verbal. The criteria for the use of AAC is not limited to children who are non verbal. Children who have limited verbal output and/or are verbal but could also have difficulty being understood by others can utilize assistive technology. AAC is used to help create functional and meaningful communication through high tech and low tech devices.