What is Speech-Language Pathology or Speech Therapy?

Speech-Language Pathologists are professionals that assess, diagnose, treat, and help individuals with many types of communication and swallowing problems. Treatment for these types of disorders are dynamic as it is highly individualized based on the person's strengths and areas of needs. A description of the areas of speech-language pathology and their respective treatments can be found below.

What skills does a speech therapist address?

We provide a comprehensive evaluation to determine your child's skills in relation to the following skills. If our standardized assessments show a difficulty requiring individualized treatment, the speech therapist will provide skilled treatment and specialized treatment protocols to assist the child in developing these skills appropriately. Please click on the areas below to get more information.

• Language: This is a term used to describe an individual's ability to understand others (receptive language) and share one's thoughts, ideas, and feelings (expressive language). This is a broad treatment area and encompasses many skills from a child's first acquisition of sounds and/or words to specific grammatical targets that allow an individual to communicate effectively in a variety of contexts.
  • Expressive Language
  • Receptive Language
  • Alternative and Augmentative Communication
  • Pragmatics
• Speech Sound Disorders: This is an umbrella term referring to any difficulty or combination of difficulties with perception, motor production, or phonological representation of speech sounds and speech segments—including phonotactic rules governing permissible speech sound sequences in a language.
  • Articulation
  • Phonology
  • Apraxia of Speech
• Voice
• Fluency
• Auditory Processing and Comprehension
• Feeding and Swallowing

Hot Topics and Parent Resources

• Power of Play
• Joint Book Reading

Resource: Content was derived from the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) at www.asha.org