What is Speech Therapy?

Speech Therapy is a unique skill set that a speech-language pathologist uses to help people across the lifespan communicate. 

Speech/Articulation

Articulation is the production of sounds in isolation and connected speech. The articulators consist of the lips, tongue, teeth, jaw, cheeks, hard palate, and soft palate.

Child’s Expected Intelligibility by Age to an Unfamiliar Adult

2 years          60-70% intelligibility

3 years          75-80% intelligibility

4 years          90-100% intelligibility

Click on the photo to view developmental speech milestones.

Everyone makes developmental speech errors when learning to talk, but as we age and our fine motor control improves, so should our speech. Delayed intervention can make remediating articulation errors more difficult at times.  If you notice your child having a hard time producing sounds or struggling to be understood by less familiar listeners, give us a call to learn more about our services and if we think your child is appropriate for an evaluation

Apraxia

Apraxia of speech, commonly referred to as childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) is a motor speech disorder that can be present at birth with an unknown cause or can be acquired by a traumatic brain injury or stroke.  In order to speak, your brain has to send a message to your mouth telling your articulators how to move.  When a person has apraxia, the communication between their brain and mouth is not working correctly.  Unlike a traditional speech/articulation delay, apraxia is not something children will outgrow. However, with intensive speech therapy, children can improve their speech greatly.

Signs of apraxia:

  • Inconsistent production of consonants and vowels in repeated words and syllables (for example, the child says the same word differently each time he or she produces it)

  • Increased difficulty producing lengthier, more complex words or phrases

  • Inappropriate stress and intonation in words and phrases

***Please be aware that these signs listed above to do not confirm a diagnosis of apraxia as they are just possible indicators.

Specialized Intervention

PROMPT (Prompting for Restructuring Oral Muscular Phonetic Targets) is a multifaceted approach used to treat a variety of speech production disorders such as expressive language, motor planning, and articulation/phonology. PROMPT is a highly successful treatment method for children with motor speech disorders such as apraxia. During PROMPT, a speech-language pathologist manually guides a patient’s jaw, lips, and tongue by targeting certain words, phrases, and sentences. Touch cues are used to shape and support proper movements of the child’s articulators. Through assistance and repetition, the child learns to plan, organize, and sequence sounds from isolation to the word level and sentence level. With practice and repetition, the therapist is able to fade out support as the child becomes an independent speaker.

Click on the link to learn more about PROMPT.