Pediatric Speech Therapy
The Goals
- Effective communication in all settings
- Clear & intelligible speech
- Understand & use language
- Enhance social communication skills
What is Pediatric Speech Therapy?
Pediatric speech therapy is a specialized therapy designed to assist children to improve their speech and language skills (comprehension & communication).
Therapists who provide pediatric speech therapy are known as speech-language pathologists, SLPs, or speech therapists. They treat conditions such as autism spectrum disorder (ASD), childhood apraxia of speech (CAS), traumatic brain injury (TBI), and other disorders that cause deficits in speech, articulation, and language acquisition.
Understanding Speech Disorders vs. Language Disorders
Types of Language Disorders
- Receptive Language Disorder: Difficulty understanding or processing language.
- Expressive Language Disorder: Struggles with putting words together, limited vocabulary, or inability to use language socially.
- Pragmatic Language Disorder: Difficulty using socially appropriate language or understanding social situations.
- Cognitive-Communication Language Disorders: Challenges with communication skills involving memory, attention, perception, organization, regulation, and problem-solving.
Types of Speech Disorders
- Articulation Disorders: Trouble saying certain sounds or words correctly.
- Fluency Disorders: Stuttering, repeating certain sounds, or trouble saying the complete word.
- Resonance or Voice Disorders: Starting a sentence loud and clear, but it becomes quiet and mumbled by the end; sounding "raspy," or talking through the nose sounding hypernasal.
Therapy Tools We Use
AAC
AAC is short for Augmentative and Alternative Communication, and includes communication devices, systems, strategies and tools that replace or support natural speech. These tools support a person who has difficulties communicating using speech.
Kaufman Speech Praxis Program
This teaches children to combine consonants and vowels to form words while controlling for oral-motor difficulty. Treatment methods employ a systematic and progressive approach of simplifying word pronunciation patterns to shape and expand verbal expression and make communication easier for children with childhood apraxia of speech and other speech sound disorders.
Beckman Oral Motor Protocol
This uses assisted movement and stretch reflexes to quantify response to pressure and movement, range, strength, variety and control of movement for the lips, cheeks, jaw, tongue and soft palate. The assessment is based on clinically defined functional parameters of minimal competence and does not require the cognitive participation of the individual. Because these components of movement are functional, not age specific, the protocol is useful with a wide range of ages and diagnostic categories.
Lindamood-Bell Reading and Comprehension Programs
These are programs that help improve reading, spelling, and comprehension for individuals of all ages with diagnoses such as dyslexia.
Jaw Strengthening and Stability Programs
Various oral motor programs are utilized to increase jaw strength and stability. Jaw strength and stability is a basis for chewing and speaking.
Moving Across Syllables
Training Articulatory Sound Sequences is a therapy tool to help children with apraxia. It trains sequencing skills within and across syllables. It is designed to help with sequenced movements as changes occur in placement of the tongue. These skills are vital for intelligibility and accuracy in conversational speech.
PROMPT
PROMPT© stands for PROMPTS for Restructuring Oral Muscular Phonetic Targets. It is a tactile-kinesthetic approach to speech therapy, which means that the speech-language pathologist uses touch cues on the client’s face (vocal folds, jaw, lips, tongue), to support and shape correct movement of these articulators. Through these specialized touch cues, the speech-language pathologist is able to guide the client through a series of syllables, words or phrases.
TalkTools® Programs
Sara Rosenfeld-Johnson’s Programs are designed to normalize oral musculature, correct articulation errors, improve abdominal grading and speech clarity, and also serves as a prerequisite for working on oral-nasal contrasts.
Horns Program
The Horns Program is designed to normalize oral musculature, correct articulation errors, improve abdominal grading and speech clarity.
Straw Program
Used in conjunction with therapy, this program promotes tongue retraction and controlled tongue movements through twelve stages of development.
Horns Program
The Horns Program is designed to normalize oral musculature, correct articulation errors, improve abdominal grading and speech clarity.
Straw Program
Used in conjunction with therapy, this program promotes tongue retraction and controlled tongue movements through twelve stages of development.
