Cognitive (intellectual, thinking) delays or other developmental delays. Enrolling your child in speech therapy helps them understand new vocabulary and teaches them how to use knowledge to answer questions. You may find that your child is actively involved in group activities and may even start conversations with other children when they learn to communicate more effectively. 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. When your speech is limited or doesn't work, pragmatic language skills are often significantly delayed and disordered. Referring your child to a speech therapist allows them to learn new words and teaches them to put them together in a sentence.
When you do, a speech-language pathologist will be able to more specifically identify the areas of speech and language development where your child needs support. Alternatively, you can book a speech-language evaluation directly with a pediatric speech therapist. In addition, speech therapy may be needed for a child who has had speech problems due to illness or injury. A pediatric occupational therapist can help you by working with your child to teach him to pronounce the sounds of speech or to recognize patterns, which will allow him to improve his overall intelligibility.
Many people have the misconception that speech therapy is just about speech, but it's much more than that. The NAPA Center is a world-renowned pediatric therapy clinic that offers speech therapy for children of all ages in traditional or intensive settings. Many children with expressive language disorder use vague phrases, such as “things,” instead of using specific language that expresses what they're feeling. Speech involves the physical ability to make a sound and speak, but expressing oneself through language is a completely different function.
Articulation is a child's ability to move the lips, tongue, palate, and jaw to produce speech sounds known as phonemes. Enrolling your child in speech therapy classes can improve the fluency and intelligibility of speech. For example, to articulate the letter “b”, the child has to activate the voice, tense the lips so that they stop a little, increase the airflow, and then release them to make a sound.
