• Do you or others have a hard time understanding your child?

• Do they replace one sound with another (“tat” for “cat”)?

• Do you hear different error patterns (“nana” for “banana”)?

While all children experience a degree of error as they develop and refine their speech, there are some patterns that persist longer than expected. When this happens, a child’s intelligibility (ability to be understood) and confidence can be significantly impacted.

We help to tease out which patterns are age-appropriate (e.g., likely to resolve by themselves) and which are not to create structured and individualized treatment plans for your child to increase their confidence and ability to be understood in all contexts.

Does your child have difficulties:

• Expressing their wants, needs, or ideas?

• Following simple or multi-step directions?

• Including or reversing parts of speech (e.g., “They has it” for “They have it”; “There is” for “There it is”; “Him goes” for “He goes”)?

• Initiating or answering a variety of questions?

Language development is complex and can be divided into many different areas - the most common being expressive and receptive language.

EXPRESSIVE LANGUAGE

» How a child shares their wants, needs, ideas, and feelings with others, whether that be through talk (using words, sentences, stories), gesture (pointing, waving, nodding), AAC (sign language, speech generating devices, communication apps, etc.), or a combination of methods.

» We work towards finding which communication methods are right for your child to help them stay connected to you and others.

RECEPTIVE LANGUAGE

» How a child understands and makes sense of what others say (e.g., direction following, vocabulary building, inferencing, etc).

» We work to help bolster your child’s understanding of the world around them.

Does your child have difficulties:

• Recognizing letter and sound associations?

• Blending simple or complex sounds into whole words?

• Reading or spelling at grade-level?

• Comprehending reading passages and follow up questions?

Using evidence-based practice, we can determine where the challenge breakdown is to assist younger and older children alike to set them up for ongoing academic and social success.

* Specialized training available using Orton-Gillingham Approach for reading, spelling, and writing.

Does your child:

• Have a hard time moving from one sound to the next in words and syllables?

• Tend to say the same word differently each time?

• Have particular difficulties producing vowel sounds?

• Have unusual prosody/intonation or word segmentation (“mo-mmy” for “mommy”)?

CAS is a motor speech disorder where a child knows what they want to say, but their brain has difficulties or inefficiencies planning out the steps needed for precise production.

» While there are some connections of CAS to specific neural factors and differences, such as a traumatic brain injury (TBI), many times, we are unsure of the exact origin. We do, however, have evidence on how to best treat the symptoms of CAS to get your child confident in mapping new patterns for easier, more intelligible speech.

* Specialized training available through Dynamic Temporal and Tactile Cueing (DTTC) methods.

Does your child:

• Eat less than 10-20 different foods?

• Exhibit extreme reactions (e.g., vomiting, crying, gagging) when presented with new or non-preferred food items?

• Eat only certain brands of food items (e.g., Tyson Dino Nuggets but not McDonald’s)?

• Suddenly start refusing a safe food that they had been eating daily?

While getting food from our plates to our mouths may seem like a simple task, it can be an intense, uncomfortable, and scary event for children with sensory or motor-related feeding difficulties.

We use systematic, play-based, and child-paced approaches to help build your child’s confidence and readiness in exploring new or difficult foods to increase their feeding repertoire and your peace of mind.

* Specialized training available via Sequential-Oral-Sensory (SOS) Approach.

Does your child:

• Repeat single syllables or words (e.g., I-I-I want to)

• Prolong sounds (e.g., shhhhhe is okay)

• Exhibit pauses throughout/between words (e.g., We are go-ing)

• Exhibit tension in their face, body, or breathing?

While children can demonstrate some of these traits during typical speech development, sustained stuttering or that which significantly impacts a child’s communication, confidence, or social interaction may warrant further support.

We focus on building your child’s communication confidence by teaching you and your child what stuttering truly is, what factors can ease or exacerbate it, and providing strategies to decrease system tension and increase readiness to turn any communication challenge into a communication success.