Why Speech Therapy

Many people think that Speech-Language Pathologists (SLPs) only work with people who have trouble making certain sounds (articulation) or who have stutters or lisps. However, the scope of practice of a speech-language pathologist is much broader than most realize. While speech-language pathologists do handle lisps and stuttering, they are also trained to help children with a variety of disorders. 

SPEECH-LANGUAGE PATHOLOGISTS help treat:
 

• Apraxia/Oral Motor Speech Disorders: a motor planning issue which results in incorrect production of various speech sounds.
   
• Articulation/Phonological Awareness Disorders: errored production of sounds resulting in reduced speech clarity (not caused by motor planning issues).
   
• Auditory Processing Disorders: difficulties analyzing and processing spoken language.
   
• Communication Disorders related to Autism: a range of speech and language difficulties that can include expressive language, receptive language, and social communication difficulties.
   
• Executive Functioning/Higher Order Thinking Skills: difficulties with the planning, organization, inference, and prediction skills needed for language-based tasks such as reading comprehension and written assignments.
   
• Expressive language problems: difficulties with verbal expression that may be due to a limited vocabulary or grammatical sentence structure complications.
   
• Fluency problems: difficulties with the flow of speech, such as stuttering and cluttering.
   
• Oral feeding problems: difficulties with eating (chewing, different textures), swallowing or drooling.
   
• Pragmatic language problems: difficulties using and understanding the nuances of language in social situations.
   
• Receptive language problems: difficulties with understanding spoken language.
   
• Resonance or voice problems: difficulties with voice pitch, volume and quality (raspy, nasal, breathy).