SPEECH AND LANGUAGE PATHOLOGY

At The Children Center at The Phoenix, Speech, and language pathologists can clinically assess and treat speech, language, and swallowing disorders in children. Speech and language pathologists can help children of any age, develop or regain their ability to speak, sing, verbalize and swallow following an injury, illness, or developmental delay. We can also help pediatric patients overcome difficulties with memory, concentration, or cognitive development.

Our specially trained therapists work closely with patients and their primary care doctors to create a personalized treatment plan, combining education with exercise and cutting-edge therapies.

Therapies can include one or more of the following specialized therapies:

Expressive Language: The inability to form meaningful messages using age-appropriate grammar or word-finding difficulties. This would be the basic verbalization skill set that communicated feelings, emotions, needs, and even joy.

Receptive Language: Difficulty understanding what is being said to them. Often the ability to visualize or comprehend is present, but the ability to use language to effectively communicate it back may be limited.

Articulation: Inability to produce age-appropriate sounds. Complex sounds are created to control basic speech, but also enable intonation, emphasis, and tone. The ability to speak deliberately and accurately is often a challenge.

Social Language: Difficulty with turn-taking, initiating and maintaining a conversation, repairing conversation breakdowns, perspective-taking, and interpreting non-verbal cues feeding and swallowing. Social settings offer complex interactions that are critical to leading a fulfilling life. The ability to navigate social settings is critical to young development.

Voice: Disturbance of pitch, loudness, or quality in relation to age, gender, and culture. Focusing on the voice of the child and training the patient to control their voice effectively.

Oral Motor: Difficulty with muscle function and/or motor planning that affects an individual’s ability to eat, drink or speak. Combined with an occupational and physical therapy approach, the ability to develop the oral motor requirements for chewing, talking, and swallowing.

Auditory Processing Disorder (APD): Difficulty in responding to auditory stimuli, poor listening skills, difficulty following multi-step directions, difficulty processing information, difficulty with reading, spelling, and vocabulary.

Augmentative: Assisting with non-verbal patient communications. We use a variety of techniques that allow us to effectively communicate at the level the patient requires. We work to reinforce that comfort and evolve it with compounding techniques over time.

Children may experience speech and language difficulty for a variety of reasons, including:

Delayed speech or Language Development
Developmental dyspraxia
Articulation disorders
Stuttering
Learning disorders
Speech disorders due to stroke, brain injury, or progressive neurological conditions
Cognitive-linguistic disorders following brain injury
Oral pharyngeal swallowing disorders