| Pediatric Speech Language Services, Inc. 46 Post Road East Westport, Connecticut 06880 203-341-0648 |
About Our Clinic
A certified speech-language pathologist may help your child develop age appropriate expressive and receptive language skills such as understanding and responding to spoken language, as well as developing age appropriate speech sounds and sentence structures.
If your child has any of the following symptoms, he or she may benefit from speech therapy:
Developmental Language Delays - Language is broken down into two components: receptive and expressive. Receptive language refers to the child’s understanding of language. Expressive language refers to the words and gestures that a child uses.
Oral Motor - This refers to the strength and coordination of facial and mouth muscles for speech and feeding. Children with oral motor disorders may exhibit drooling, poor control of food while eating, and unclear speech.
Apraxia - For unknown reasons, children with apraxia have great difficulty planning and producing the precise, highly refined and specific series of movements of the tongue, lips, jaw and palate that are necessary for intelligigible speech. Apraxia of speech may also be called verbal apraxia or verbal dypraxia. The most important concept is the root word "praxis." Praxis means planned movement. This child has difficulty programming and planning speech movements. Apraxia of speech is considered a motor speech disorder.
Fluency (stuttering) disorders - This refers to a disorder of speech fluency that interrupts the forward flow of speech.
Articulation Disorders - This refers to the speech production of all the sounds within a language.
Pre-language skills - this refers to eye contact, gestural communication, facial expression, babbling, sound imitation and other nonverbal communication methods that emerge before verbal communication.
Cognitive delays - Cognition covers thinking skills such as memory, organization, planning and problem solving. Cognitive deficits may result from brain trauma, developmental delay, and various diagnoses.
Autistic Spectrum Disorder - Reciprocal social interaction -- two way communication -- is central to development, including the areas of language, plays skills, peer play, and cognitive skills. Effective reciprocal social interaction relies on a set of skills that most of us take for granted: looking at others, communicating nonverbally, initiating and responding to play overtures, getting someone's attention before communicating, and responding to questions and comments with related answers. These are all elements of what Dr. Stanley Greenspan calls "opening and closing circles of communication." This social connection enables us to learn from others, to develop relationships, and to become participating members of a family and community.
Children with develpmental challenges often process information in ways that are different from typically developing children. Among other things, these children can have highly selective, repetitive, or unusual interests, as well as a narrow range of motivation. In a relationship-based approach, the adults works to establish social engagement by using these interests as a starting point. The adult builds upon these natural motivations to develop engagement, relatedness, and intentional two-way communication.
Greenspan's recent research shows that a child-centered, Floortime approach can improve attention and engagement in toddlers, reduce irritability, improve self-regulation, and foster a child's ability to move up in the developmental ladder. This approach translates into a therapy that is respectful and nonjudgmental, and at the same time is comprehensive, intense and effective.