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Our goals are set according to our patients’ needs and parents’ interests, focusing on:

Oral motor skills: it is related to the movements of the muscles in our articulators (tongue, lips, teeth and jaw) and control the strength and coordination of them for feeding and speaking. Our clinicians will examine the kids’ structures as: lips (lip rounding, lip spreading and lip closure); tongue (tongue movement); and mandible movements that may contribute to phonological disorders.

Non-verbal kids: when kids cannot speak, they feel frustrated because they are not easily understood. To get a faster way to communicate, we can teach your child to use an augmentative and alternative communication method. Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS) is an effective communication method to convey non-verbal kids’ thoughts and needs.

Articulation: it is how we coordinate our articulators (how we physically move our tongue, lips, teeth and jaw to produce individual sounds.

 Phonological disorder: to understand a phonological disorder, first we have to understand what phonology is: “Phonology” has an inventory of sounds and its governing rules that help us make syllables, words and how to arrange them. If the phonology system develops slowly, children will develop speech delay, resulting in mild to severe problems. The child might have a significant problem producing speech sounds and has the inability to correctly form the sounds of the words.Fluency Disorders: when your speech presents pauses, interjections and revisions that affect your fluency (stuttering). 

Processing of Receptive and Expressive Language: most kids diagnosed with speech and language delay need to increase their vocabulary skills (name and describe common objects), and use appropriately the parts of speech (nouns, verb tenses, adjectives, adverbs, etc). Patients with expressive language disorder have difficulty explaining their thoughts, and patients with receptive language disorders have a hard time understanding what other people say. In both cases, there are disruptions to follow a conversation and to stay in topic.

Expanding sentences: kids with speech and language delay communicate using mostly gestures, signs and producing a few sounds (ah, ah, ah). We can use those sounds and those abilities to increase their verbal output to produce syllables, words and expand them to simple sentences:”I see a dog” ; “I see a cat”, using the same carrier phrase.

 Reading Skills (phonemic, phonological awareness, rhyming, decoding and reading comprehension): it is important for kids to sound out correctly all the letters of the alphabet and to apply this knowledge with letter-sound relationships to correctly pronounce and read written words, which will help them to increase reading speed and improve reading comprehension.Spelling and Written Expression: the ability to recall correctly the letters that form a word. Patients with a written expression disorder could have difficulty with handwriting (dysgraphia), spelling and composition. 

 Social Pragmatics: it is the ability to use language for greeting, informing or requesting. If one of these aspects is affected, the patient will present poor social skills to interact with peer and adults.Speech is the “neuromuscular process that allows humans to express language as a vocal product. In spoken communication, after our ideas are formulated (language), they must be transmitted. Speech involves the very precise activation of muscles during: respiration, phonation, and articulation” (Justice, 2010, p.15).Language is the “socially shared code that uses a conventional system of arbitrary symbols to represent ideas about the world that are meaningful to others who know the same code” (Nelson, 1998, p. 26).