Early language skills are acquired throughout infancy and early childhood. These skills include expressive language (babbling/words), receptive language (understanding language), and nonverbal language (gestures). Children are expected to meet language milestones, though each child develops at their own pace. We use these milestones as more of a general guide to help us determine whether a child can benefit from speech therapy or not at any given point in their development. We will use a play-based model to meet your child where they are in their development, find their strengths, and improve their skills from there. Techniques and strategies are taught to caregivers to promote carryover and empower caregivers to have a meaningful impact on improving their child’s language development.

Articulation is the way you produce individual phonemes. It’s the “speech” portion of “speech and language.” You’ve probably heard of SLPs treating a lisp, or teaching the R sound. In fact, articulation therapy can be for any phoneme that is incorrectly produced at the appropriate age. In articulation therapy, we target specific phonemes and teach accurate placement before anything else, making sure we’ve instilled accurate “muscle memory patterns.” Once placement and production are accurate, we’ll move up the “articulation hierarchy” until the sound is accurate in conversation. Articulation is muscle memory, and muscle memory requires practice! We’ll always send home targets to practice at home to ensure your child doesn’t lose this muscle memory from week to week.

While phonology can mask as an articulation difficulty, it is instead patterns within speech that are not age appropriate. Phonological processes refers to these patterns/rules of a language. For example, if a child is leaving off the last sound of almost every word, that is a “phonological process” called Final Consonant Deletion, not an articulation disorder. Another example would be if a child says “tootie” for “cookie.” That process is called “fronting” in that the sound /k/ that’s made with the back of the tongue is now /t/, made with the front of the tongue.

Speech therapy focusing on written narratives will target narrative content, structure, cohesiveness, grammar, punctuation, and organization of essays, paragraphs, and short responses. We will collaborate with schools and teachers to carry over any techniques, organizers, and language that is used in the classroom to ensure consistency.

Oral narratives, or story-telling, is used both academically and socially. The question can be as simple as “what did you do last weekend” in a regular turn-taking conversation, or it could ask your opinion on a book read in class. This can be difficult for children who struggle with cohesive story-telling. Therapy focusing on oral narratives will target language used, structure, organization, coherence, and flow. We will work to eliminate tangential information to ensure that oral narratives remain on topic with a substantive response.

The skills required of higher level language comprehension and use go beyond basic language skills. These include inferencing, double meanings, figurative language, sarcasm, perspective-taking, and problem-solving. Academically, difficulty with these skills can manifest in trouble with overall reading comprehension and then related questions. Socially, they are used in conversation, making and sustaining friendships, nonverbal gestures and social cues, and more. We work to improve all of these areas of language systematically and build upon your child’s strengths in very functional ways. Collaboration with schools and families is key to carry over specific language and approaches into our therapy sessions.

Fluency/stuttering therapy focuses on teaching your child not only strategies to implement while speaking, but also ensuring that your child is a confident speaker. Stuttering can manifest in many different ways and can even be so subtle that it goes unnoticed. We will work with each child to obtain their specific fluency breakdown and identify if it impacts them emotionally and academically. Carryover strategies will be taught to caregivers in our sessions. Our goal is for your child to always speak confidently and never feel as though they can’t participate due to their stutter.

Signs of word-finding difficulties are: mixing up words, using related words, using “that” or “thing” often, or talking “around” the word by describing the meaning. These difficulties can manifest in everyday social communication and/or in academics. Your child may have difficulty retaining new words and have a smaller overall vocabulary as compared to their peers. We will work with your child to build their vocabulary and teach them strategies to recall and use desired words in social and academic situations.

Social communication encompasses the ability to interpret body language, maintain a turn-taking conversation, perspective-taking, interpreting sarcasm, toping maintenance, and understanding the ever-changing social cues. Social communication difficulties may be linked to difficulty with higher level language skills. Difficulties in social communication may impact a child’s ability to engage with peers, make friends, and engage in flexible social behaviors. We explicitly teach children social “rules” and the necessary skills to engage in social interactions. With younger children, this is done through role play, DIR Floortime models, visuals, books, and social thinking approaches. With school-aged children, skills may incorporate more explicitly when necessary.

Myofunctional swallowing focuses on retraining a child’s swallow pattern to eliminate tongue-thrusting. Signs of a tongue-thrust swallow include pushing the tongue forward on the front teeth to swallow, inability to swallow with mouth open, low tongue resting position, mouth-breathing, and difficulty managing certain foods. A tongue-thrust swallow can also ultimately impact dentition and orthodontics. We work with children to retrain the tongue to create a “mature” swallow pattern with the tongue pushing against the top of the mouth rather than pushing forward on the teeth.

Whether your child’s feeding difficulties are due to food aversions, picky eating, medical difficulties, or something else - we can help! Mealtime and feeding do not have to be stressful. Our on-staff feeding therapist will work with your child and your family to build a trusting relationship with food. Using the SOS Approach to feeding we focus on reducing the anxiety and expectation around feeding for picky eaters. Our goal is to promote positive interactions with foods to expand your child’s food repertoires through desensitization to non-preferred foods. Using trainings from SOFFI, PIOMI, and Beckman oral motor strategies we will improve your child’s coordination and strength of their oral musculature to support safe and efficient feeding.