The Many Talents of a Speech and Language Pathologist

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Darlene Jones, MA, CCC-SLP provided our September community education presentation entitled “How Can a Speech-Language Pathologist Help My Child?”

Speech Pathologists (SLPs) are experts in communication and swallowing who work with all ages, from newborn to the elderly. SLPs can help your child in any of the following areas:

• Pre-linguistic—Your child’s ability to share focus with another person (joint attention), their intention to communicate with others, and their use of signs or gestures in a communicative way.

• Speech production—How your child says individual sounds and blends them together to make words. Challenges with speech production can impact how well others understand your child as well as your child’s spelling, reading and writing.

• Fluency—How your child’s speech “flows,” including the rate of speech and the effort it takes.

• Language—This includes how well your child understands what they hear or read (receptive language) and how they use words to share thoughts, ideas and feelings (expressive language). Language is a big category that involves your child’s use of correct sentence structures, the content of what they say, the social appropriateness of their language, and literacy.

• Cognition—Your child’s attention, memory, problem solving and executive functioning. Your child’s ability to organize their thoughts impacts communication!

• Voice and Resonance—How your child’s voice sounds. This includes voice quality, pitch, volume, and nasality.

• Swallowing and Feeding—How well your child sucks, chews and swallows food and liquid. An SLP can treat children who have atypical eating symptoms such as being overly selective and having negative physiological responses to food.

• Hearing and Aural Rehabilitation—How your child hears, and how their brain perceives sound and speech, including when your child’s speech, language or communication is impacted by hearing loss or deafness. An SLP can also help your child with auditory processing challenges.

For more information look here:

https://www.superduperinc.com/handouts/pdf/162%20SLPs.pdf

https://www.asha.org/public/Who-Are-Speech-Language-Pathologists/

Originally posted by Growing Healthy Children Therapy Services via Locable