It helps people develop skills such as comprehension, clarity, voice, fluency, and sound production.
Speech therapy
can treat speech disorders in children or speech disorders in adults caused by stroke, brain injury, or other conditions. Speech therapy helps children improve their communication skills with other children and adults. It focuses on improving speech muscles through special exercises.Speech exercises involve repeating sounds and imitating the speech therapist. Speech therapy can treat a wide variety of speech and language delays and disorders in children and adults. With early intervention, speech therapy can improve communication and increase self-confidence. The goals of speech therapy include improving pronunciation, strengthening the muscles used in speech, and learning to speak properly.
Some speech disorders begin in childhood and improve with age, while others continue into adulthood and require long-term treatment and maintenance. Speech therapy for young children has been shown to be most successful when started at an early age and practiced at home with the involvement of a parent or caregiver. Many people have the misconception that speech therapy is only about speech, but it's much more than that. For your child, speech therapy can be done in a classroom or small group, or individually, depending on the speech disorder.
People with speech disorders have difficulty producing speech sounds, saying words clearly, or speaking fluently. These include articulation therapy, language intervention activities, and others, depending on the type of speech or language disorder. If you notice that your child is not up to par with his peers or does not have developmental milestones for his age, intensive or ongoing speech therapy sessions may be beneficial for your child. The therapist can massage the face and perform exercises with the tongue, lips, and jaw to strengthen it.
As a speech-language pathologist, I often teach my patients how to communicate in other ways besides a formal means of assisted communication (e.g., children receive treatment for different speech disorders, stuttering, problems with pronouncing words, problems with tone, volume, or quality of speech, and have a limited understanding of words and their meaning). There are several speech therapy techniques for each of the areas described above; the ones considered depend on the particular disorder. The NAPA Center is a world-renowned pediatric therapy clinic that provides speech therapy for children of all ages in traditional or intensive settings. Disorder is abnormally fast speech that causes pronunciation to be imprecise or omits sounds or parts of words.
For the conditions listed above, prescription speech therapy is usually covered by statutory health insurers (other than a fixed amount that you have to pay yourself, known as a copay).
