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As Speech-Language Pathologists (SLPs), we often speak to parents about the importance of initial and updated assessments. For starters, an assessment is “the ongoing procedures used by qualified personnel to identify the child’s unique strengths and needs and the early intervention services appropriate to meet those needs throughout the period of the child’s eligibility…and includes the assessment of the child…and

Parents often hear the word cue multiple times throughout their child’s speech and language services in initial reports, progress reports, and even during therapy itself. But what does that really mean in terms of their child’s performance? A cue is assistance presented to the child in order to assist them in their success. This idea sounds easy enough, but there

The term practice means perfect, may be an over-statement, as nothing in this world can be without imperfections. In speech and language therapy, we can adapt this term to “practice makes improvements”. It can be extremely frustrating for children and adult patients alike to attend sessions, week after week, and feel like there are little to no observable gains. Speech

While April may be over, but that doesn’t mean you can’t grow plants inside or still have success growing plants outside. Using plants is a great way to expand your child’s vocabulary and provide an opportunity to follow directions during planting and watering schedules. Depending on what your child’s goals are will change how you approach this hands-on project. How

Aphasia affects spoken language, language comprehension, written language, and reading. Aphasia is always due to injury to the brain-most commonly from a stroke, particularly in older individuals. But brain injuries resulting in aphasia may also arise from head trauma, from brain tumors, or from infections. Aphasia has been described as the tip of the tongue feeling you sometimes get when

Why should I get my child’s hearing tested annually? In the first few years of life, hearing is a critical part of kids’ social, emotional, and cognitive development. Even a mild or partial hearing loss can affect a child’s ability to develop speech and language properly. A newborn hearing screening doesn’t prevent children from having conductive hearing losses. Children are

Speechreading is a type of aural rehabilitation which with training can be enhanced and tuned as a means of understanding someone better, but speechreading starts to first develop in everyone around four to eight months after birth. If a child is typically developing, at around 12 months of age, the infant will alternate between looking at the speaker’s eyes, lips

What is it? Avoidance behaviors are commonly seen in people who stutter and are any behavior that a person uses to prevent a stuttering event from happening. What are common types of avoidance behaviors? Though each individual is different, common behaviors include eye blinking, leaning forward, substituting words the individual has difficulty producing fluently, vocal and/or non-vocal pauses, fear of

To target improvement in word retrieval skills, the Semantic Feature Analysis (SFA) treatment method is used. This method uses a chart to analyze features of a visually presented item and the client is instructed to use the chart to produce features of the target item which should result in the identification of the item’s name. This method uses clinician guidance