Speech Therapy
A child’s first words are something that all parents look forward to; often imagining how much easier it will be when they can use their words, instead of crying out of frustration.
However, while your child beginning to speak can be an exciting time, it can also be stressful when they have difficulties communicating effectively and efficiently.
Speech therapy is a service provided to aid individuals in overcoming communication difficulties that may impact their ability to build relationships and interact with others on a day-to-day basis. These difficulties include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Late talkers
- Articulation/Phonology Disorders: Difficulties with the way sounds are formed. If your child struggles with this, it is likely others have a hard time understanding them.
- Childhood Apraxia of Speech: These children have difficulty with the motor planning of speech productions. They are highly unintelligible and might appear to try really hard to communicate but they are unable to.
- Receptive/Expressive Language Disorders (vocabulary, comprehension, sentence structures, etc.): If you child struggles with this, they may have difficulties following directions, paying attention to tasks, do not use as many words as other children or have difficulty combining words into sentences.
- Fluency (Stuttering): Your child might have disruption in the flow of speech and repeat syllables, words or phrases resulting in unnatural speech. Parents often describe their child getting “stuck” on words.
- Pragmatic/Social communication: Difficulty understanding the “social” rules of language, such as humor, personal space/boundaries and conversational rules
Does your child need an assessment?
Are you unsure if speech therapy is what your child needs? See below for a brief timeline of when your child should reach certain speech milestones.
- 12 months of age: Your child will say their first word and should soon after have 2-6 words in their vocabulary, other than “mama” and “dada.”
- 18 months: Your child should be saying approximately 50 words on a regular basis.
- 18-24 months: Your child will begin to combine words.
- 24-30 months: Your child should have 200-300 words in their vocabulary.
- 2 years: Your child should be 50% intelligible to an unknown listener.
- 3 years: your child should be using 3-word phrases and have a vocabulary of up to 1000 words. Your child should be 75% intelligible to an unknown listener.
- 4 years: Your child should be 100% intelligible to an unknown listener.
Teaching Techniques
Do you want to know more about speech issues that children can face? Or do you have questions about a diagnosis your child has received? Here are a few resources to get you started:
We understand it is difficult to seek help for your child and we’re here to support you every step of the way.
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