SERVICES
Speech Language Disorders
Speech and language disorders can affect the ability to communicate effectively. It can affect the ability to comprehend and express language. Deficits or delays in any area of speech and language functioning can have a negative effect on learning skills, academic achievement, and socialization skills. The nature and severity of deficits or delays can vary greatly. The role of the speech language pathologist is to evaluate, diagnose and select appropriate treatment plans based on scientific evidence currently available.
screen, evaluate and provide pediatric treatment services in the following areas of speech language development that may be affected and impacting on a child's ability to communicate effectively:
- Articulation
- Phonological
- Language
- Oral Motor
- Fluency
- Childhood Apraxia of Speech (CAS)
- Pragmatic Language Skills
The following is a brief description of the above mentioned areas of speech language development. For more information, contact the American Speech Language and Hearing Association (ASHA) or visit their website at http://www.asha.org/.
Articulation Disorder: disorder that involves difficulties in producing sounds. Errors can consist of substitutions, omissions, additions and distortions. It can make a child difficult to be understood.
Phonological Disorder: A disorder that involves patterns of sounds errors such as producing sounds in the front of the mouth when the sound should be produced in the back of the mouth, e.g. tar for car.
Language Disorder: A disorder that can affect the comprehension and/or production of language to communicate. Some children can have difficulty understanding and following directions; understanding and responding to questions; identifying and labeling objects and pictures; forming phrases and/or sentences to make requests, ask questions, sustain a topic of conversation; understanding and using established rules for formulating meaningful phrases and sentences; relating or retelling of recent or remote experiences in a sequential and logical manner.
Oral Motor Weakness: Weakness in the musculature of the oral articulatory system, i.e. tongue, lips, jaw, resulting in poor or inaccurate movements affecting speech clarity and feeding.
Fluency Disorder: A disorder that involves the disruption of the flow or rhythm of spoken language. It can be characterized by hesitations, repetitions of single sounds, syllables, whole words, and/or whole phrases.
Childhood Apraxia of Speech: A motor planning disorder which results in misarticulated or mispronounced words. There is difficulty coordinating muscle movements of the lips, jaw and tongue necessary to produce sounds, syllables and words.
Pragmatic Language Disorder: A disorder that involves difficulty using language in a socially appropriate manner such as in greetings, making requests, shifting language for a specific situation or context, initiating and maintaining a conversation, etc. Rule of thumb for being pragmatically correct would be the ability to say the right thing, at the right time to the right person.
Bilingualism and Speech Language Disorders
Bilingualism is the use of two or more languages by an individual. Proficiency and dominance can vary and depend on the exposure to the two languages. For example, a child can be dominant in Spanish at home when he/she speaks with his/her parents, but dominant in English when he/she speaks with his/her brothers and/or friends. There is no evidence to support the myth that learning two or more languages will confuse to a child and will cause a speech language disorder. A child that presents with deficits or delays in his/her speech language development will exhibit deficits in both languages.