Helping your child unlock their potential
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We Offer Our Clients Support With:
SPEECH
Does your child experience difficulties being understood by people, reduced clarity when they speak, delayed speech skills, difficulties producing individual sounds, difficulties with precise lips/tongue/jaw movement? These challenges may stem from issues related to perception, motor production, or phonological representation of speech sounds and speech segments. As a result, they may face articulation, phonological and/or motor speech difficulties. Our experienced speech-language pathologist (SLP) can help support these needs through evidence based speech therapy tailored to your child's unique challenges.
Articulation
Individual sounds are produced in error; there is no pattern to the errors. Example, delayed production of “r” sound or a lisp.
Phonological
Groups of sounds are produced in predictable rule-based errors. Individual has difficulty organizing patterns of sounds in the brain; no difficulty with physically producing sounds.
Example, all sounds that are supposed to be produced using the back of the tongue are produced using the front of the tongue ("t" for "k" and "d" for "g").
Motor Speech
Individual presents with underlying difficulties with motoric movements of the lips, tongue, jaw, vocal cords, velum. Difficulties may be impacted by poor timing, effortful, poor sequencing of motor movements, high/low tone. Motor speech disorders may be diagnosed by a physician as "dysarthria", "Childhood Apraxia of Speech" or "Motor Speech Disorder Not Otherwise Specified".
Structural
Individual may present with unclear speech due to underlying structural abnormalities. Examples include; cleft lip/palate, tongue tie, under bite, high arched palate, dental anomalies and/or facial asymmetry.
Sensory/Perceptual
Clarity of speech is impacted by input of sensory information and/or how child processes this input. Example, underlying hearing impairment.
FLUENCY
Fluency refers to continuity, smoothness, rate, and effort in speech production.
Stuttering
Stuttering is characterized by repetition of sounds, syllables, or words; prolongation of sounds; and interruptions in speech known as blocks. Individuals may get stuck on certain words or sounds, feel tense or uncomfortable, change words to avoid stuttering and demonstrate secondary behaviours.
Cluttering
Characterized by rapid and/or irregular speech rate, atypical pauses, maze behaviors, pragmatic issues, decreased awareness of fluency problems or moments of disfluency, excessive disfluencies, collapsing or omitting syllables, and language formulation issues, which result in breakdowns in speech clarity and/or fluency (St. Louis & Schulte, 2011; van Zaalen-Opt Hof & Reichel, 2014).
OTHER AREAS OF COMMUNICATION THAT MAY NEED SUPPORT
Language Development
Infants and toddlers may show red flags early on for later speech production difficulties. Some of these red flags include: no babbling by 9 months, no first words by 15 months, limited consonant and vowel sounds, reduced imitation of sounds, prefers to communicate via gestures and poor prosody.
Individuals with speech concerns are at a higher risk for Language Impairment or Language Disorder. Areas of language development that should be monitored for delays include: vocabulary, utterance length, grammar, oral narrative development; understanding of concepts, figurative language, following directions and answering questions.
Literacy
Speech sound difficulties can impact learning and literacy; studies have shown that 18% of children with impaired speech will have difficulty reading in elementary school by about third or fourth grade (Lewis, et al, 2011). Reading fluency, comprehension and phonological awareness skills should be monitored and supported as needed. Additionally, writing skills should be monitored, and a referral to an occupational therapist may be recommended.
Augmentative & Alternative Communication
Individuals with severely reduced clarity of speech may require support to develop strategies or use alternative modes of communication to be understood by others. There are many types of AAC which may be used depending on the clients needs and strengths.
Social Skills
Individuals with fluency and/or speech sound deficits may avoid participation in certain social activities; and/or be unaware of moments where they are not understood. Support can be provided to build confidence initiating communication and repairing breakdowns.
Feeding
Individuals with speech difficulties, particularly structural and motoric difficulties, may also have concerns with chewing and swallowing food safely.