Lynnwood Speech and Language Services

Language is made up of socially shared rules that include the following:

• What words mean (e.g., "star" can refer to a bright object in the night sky or a celebrity)
• How to make new words (e.g., friend, friendly, unfriendly)
• How to put words together (e.g., "Peg walked to the new store" rather than "Peg walk store new")
• What word combinations are best in what situations ("Would you mind moving your foot?" could quickly change to "Get off my foot, please!" if the first request did not produce results)

Speech is the verbal means of communicating. Speech consists of the following:

• Articulation: How speech sounds are made (e.g., children must learn how to produce the "r" sound in order to say "bird" instead of "bood").
• Phonology: Speech delay marked by error patterns such as deleting clusters (tar/star), sound substitutions such as fronting (t/k) or stopping airflow (t/s, d/z).
• Voice: Use of the vocal folds and breathing to produce sound (e.g., the voice can be abused from overuse or misuse and can lead to hoarseness or loss of voice).
• Fluency: The rhythm of speech (e.g., hesitations or stuttering can affect fluency).

When a person has trouble understanding others (receptive language), or sharing thoughts, ideas, and feelings completely (expressive language), then he or she has a language delay or disorder.

When a person is unable to produce speech sounds correctly or fluently, or has problems with his or her voice, then he or she has a speech delay or disorder.

INTERVENTION PROGRAMS 

SCERTS: Social Communication, Emotional Regulation and Transactional Support. This is a wonderful developmental approach founded in research based on typical child development. It is a family friendly means to engage your child and help to facilitate more neurotypical development across social and language domains.

Floortime: The objectives of the DIR®/Floortime™ Model are to build healthy foundations for social, emotional, and intellectual capacities rather than focusing on skills and isolated behaviors.

PROMPT: Prompts for Restructuring Oral Musculature and Phonetic Targets. It is a multi-dimensional approach to speech production disorders that embraces physical-sensory, as well as cognitive-linguistic and social-emotional aspects of development.