Terminology Part II: What do all those speech terms mean? (continued)

To follow up on information that was introduced in our last post, we would like to share more with you about the different terms we may use to describe the types of therapies we might recommend for our patients.

Speech Therapy: 

The goal of speech therapy is to help your child communicate clearly, use the correct sounds in the correct places, and to be understood. Speech therapy services can improve your child’s speech intelligibility (i.e. speech clarity) by focusing on areas such as articulation, phonology, and fluency. Articulation and phonology disorders, and the therapy for these speech difficulties, will address speech sound errors such as substitutions, distortions, or omissions of specific sounds.

Side note: There are different approaches to improve speech sound production. Many speech therapists address only how these sounds sound and don’t focus as much on how the speech sounds are made. Sometimes this is totally fine. Other times, it teaches kids to set up compensations. For example, maybe they can make an L sound like an L, but they’re putting their tongue in the wrong place or using the wrong tongue shape. This almost always means the child is using muscles or structures in the wrong way (i.e. compensating). Sometimes this is fine! There are no unintended consequences. But other times, it can cause other issues including jaw pain/TMJ issues, neck/back pain from incorrectly used muscles, etc. At Expressions, we think it’s important for our patients to learn how to produce speech sounds correctly so they don’t set up these compensation patterns.

Fluency disorders include stuttering, cluttering, and other difficulties that disrupt the smooth flow of speech, including when speech is disfluent due to inadequate breath control. Just like we describe above regarding articulation and phonology, we think it’s important to try to address any underlying cause there might be, so we will likely address breath support and proper oral function in fluency therapy as well.

Language Therapy:

Language therapy can focus on a variety of areas including but not limited to: helping the child communicate wants and needs, use language for different functions (i.e. ask questions, answer questions, comment or show interest), increase vocabulary, connect with others, and acknowledge and respond to others communication attempts.

Whether your child is not communicating much yet at all, seems to be communicating less effectively than their peers, is having trouble following directions, or is having difficulty answering questions, these are all things that would fall under the category of language therapy. In addition, some children receive therapy geared towards skills like making friends and socializing with others. Pragmatic language skills like these also fall into the scope of language therapy.

Feeding Therapy:

Feeding therapy is more than just helping an individual who is a “picky eater” or improving someone’s ability to swallow, though these are the things people most commonly recognize as feeding therapy. We provide individualized treatment based on each patient's needs. Many patients benefit from oral motor work and/or sensory-based exposure to new foods. Your child may benefit from feeding therapy if: mealtimes are difficult, they have lack of variety in their diet, or they have difficulty trying new foods. See our previous post to learn more about additional feeding concerns! https://buff.ly/3vFDlie

At Expressions, you may also notice us addressing any chewing, drinking, or swallowing issues that we identify in the course of treating your child’s speech. This is because oral function is very important to making speech accurate and clear, and the way we use our mouths for eating and drinking can have an impact on the way we use our mouths for speech. As always, we believe that the “why” behind the symptoms is important, and should drive our treatment goals. 

Thank you for reading! We hope that some of this information is helpful to you as you help your child along on their path to effective communication.

If you have any questions or suspect that your child may benefit from any of these areas of treatment, please contact us at 205-739-2066 or frontdesk@expressionspediatrictherapy.com

Authors: Danielle Allen M.S., CCC-SLP and Lauren Hughes M.S., CCC-SLP