What is Speech Therapy?

Speech therapy is a type of therapy that, broadly speaking, focuses on helping people improve their communication. We work on enhancing what people can understand, what they can say, how their speech sounds, and how they interact and engage with others (oh, and how to swallow!).

Pediatric speech-language pathologists (SLPs) treat a range of disorders in children, including speech and language disorders, fluency disorders (stuttering), speech sound disorders (pronunciation), voice disorders, autism, cognitive-communication disorders, and swallowing disorders. SLPs don’t work solely with school-aged children! In fact, SLPs work across the lifespan, from infants learning how to feed to adults who have suffered a stroke and are having trouble communicating as they once did.

Early Intervention Speech Therapy

As a pediatric speech therapy practice focused on early intervention, our mission is to help very young children learn how to communicate better. We believe early intervention is key to unleashing a child's lifelong potential. With such a broad scope of speech-language pathology, it can be confusing to understand what is expected of an SLP and how we can support you and your child in their communication development.

Language Develops in Stages Over Many Years

When teaching young children to communicate, it's essential to recognize that speech development is a gradual process, much like a baby's stages of development when learning to walk. A one-year-old's language skills are going to look quite different from a child at 4 or 5 years old. Please check out our Little Book of Communication Milestones to help you understand where your child's language skills should be at a specific age.

Build Connection

When we first start working with a new child in our practice our first job is to establish a connection. We believe that before we can provide meaningful assistance, we must first develop a relationship with the child. This often involves observing and engaging with them in their world of play, using sensory experiences to interest and regulate them, rather than first expecting them to enter our adult world.

Pre-Linguistic Skills

We then assess the development of the child's pre-linguistic skills if they are not yet speaking. These are skills that children learn before they start uttering words, such as eye contact, joint attention, following directions, and engagement. We also evaluate children's motor skills, including how they move their mouth and tongue, as well as basic feeding skills, such as whether the child can self-feed successfully and drink from a cup.

If the child is speaking we examine where they are at in the development of each of the main domains of language-- expressive language, receptive language, and pragmatic language. We learn the child's strengths and how we can use those strengths to teach new areas. I have taught many kids two and three-word phrases with the help of their special interests!

Assessing Speech Sounds / Articulation

We observe how very young children use speech sounds (e.g., how they produce consonant and vowel sounds) in isolation, syllables, words, and connected speech. Can they articulate all the different vowels and consonants that we would expect for a child their age? How much of what the child says can we understand? The development of speech articulation, pronunciation, or clarity also follows a continuum, much like language skills, where one sound builds upon another, resulting in clearer speech.

Matching Service with Needs

When working with a child who is struggling with their language development, we meet them at their developmental level independently and work at or a little above there (we call this zone of proximal development). If they are still developing their pre-linguistic skills, we continue to work on these skills, as they form the foundation for language. For those not yet speaking or with highly unintelligible speech, we like to introduce alternative and augmentative communication methods (e.g., software on a tablet that includes different words and programmed phrases), providing your child with a means to communicate as soon as possible.

What Speech Therapy Looks Like

Speech therapy at Little Language Lab looks different depending on the age of the child. In the early years (0-3) we prefer to teach parents how to incorporate language strategies into every day life and things that parents are already doing so we get a bigger bang for our buck with our therapy time. As kids get older, and parents have a strong understanding of how they can help at home, we provide more individualized sessions with the child directly. We use exciting materials, communicate authentically, and express enthusiasm about things that interest them. We incorporate the child's daily routines to teach vocabulary that is relevant to their life.

In early intervention speech therapy, we consistently model language, demonstrating to young children how to express themselves about what they are doing, and focus on building receptive (understanding) abilities before expecting the child to speak the words themselves. We incorporate playful sounds, such as those of cars, animals, and exclamations like “uh oh!” and “whoa!”, to ignite their enthusiasm for using language. We shape young children’s responses, acknowledging and celebrating all attempts to communicate.

Our approach is to "start where they are" and create rich opportunities for the child to express their wants, needs, and ideas. You'd be amazed at how initiating an authentic connection and immersing ourselves in the child's world can significantly boost language development when integrated with speech therapy techniques.