Speech & Language Therapy

What is Speech Language Pathology?

Speech Language Pathology is a profession that diagnoses and treats communicational and feeding delays and/or disorders. Services can be provided for individuals, groups, and families from various linguistic and cultural backgrounds.

At Developmental Therapies and Beyond, our SLPs have experience in the areas of speech sound production; including articulation, apraxia of speech (difficulties using vocalizations consistently with no apparent physical cause), dysarthria (difficulties pronouncing sounds due to physical weakness) and ataxia (difficulties managing precise movements with certain muscles like the tongue, arms, legs, etc.) resonance, including but not limited to hyper and hypo-nasality; voice, working with phonation quality, pitch, loudness and respiration; fluency, considering stuttering and cluttering.

language comprehension and expression, looking at phonology (how sounds are put together to form a syllable), morphology (how syllables are put together into words), syntax ( how words are put together to form sentences), semantics (meaning of words), pragmatics ( language use, social aspect of communication), literacy (reading, writing and spelling), pre-linguistic communication (e.g., joint attention, communicative intent, etc.), paralinguistic communication (e.g., gestures, pointing, etc.); cognition, considering the areas of attention, memory, sequencing , problem solving and executive functioning; and feeding/swallowing aspects such as oral, pharyngeal and laryngeal deficiencies, orofacial myology (including tongue thrust) and oral-motor functions.

What does the SLP work on?