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Voice disorders may be caused by several different factors, events, physical ailments, and diseases. Voice therapy has been administered to those who experience hoarseness, breathiness, or raspy vocal quality. The purpose of voice therapy is to help an individual use their voice without stress or tension and relieve the vocal symptoms that may be bothering him/her. Each voice therapy program

What is Mean Length of Utterance (MLU)? The term “mean length of utterance” is often used when speech therapists talk about increasing the sentence length of children. For example, if a child is learning how to talk they often have a MLU of one because they are only using one word at a time. As a child grows their MLU

Pragmatic skills are the rules of social language. These skills play an important role in communication. An individual must use their pragmatic skills for the purposes of using language, changing language, and following rules. It is important that an individual knows how to use language appropriately in social situations in order to avoid conflict or harmful consequences. Three major communication

It is common for children to make some mistakes as they learn new sounds and words. Children are expected to follow a similar pattern of phoneme acquisition. The term phonological processes refer to the simplification of adult like speech that children use to communicate. Most of the processes that occur are considered typical until two years old and others until

Many people are familiar with the term “stuttering.” Stuttering is a disorder which affects the fluency of speech and is characterized by “disruptions in the production of speech sounds, also known as disfluencies.”(ASHA) Based on this definition, it would seem likely that identifying stuttering in an individual’s speech would be an easy task. However, accurate identification of early childhood stuttering comes with

Recently, I have had quite a few kids on my caseload who have a “horse” or “raspy” voice. When I bring this up to parents, many of them respond “oh she’s always just had a raspy voice!”. But did you know that this “raspy” vocal quality is often a sign of vocal abuse? Vocal strain and nodules are caused by stress to

Did you know that sign language can be beneficial to not only individuals with hearing impairments, but also to babies who are first learning to communicate?  In fact, babies actually develop the ability to point and gesture before they even use words to express their wants and needs! Many parents may be skeptical to introduce sign language to their babies

 Did you know that a child’s speech and language development can actually have a significant impact on their development of literacy skills? Many people may not know that literacy skills, such as reading and writing, are actually language based skills.  Research has shown that there is a strong relationship between language impairment in early childhood and reading and spelling difficulties in school

What is a stroke? Brain Disruption caused by “vascular disruptions” Loss of blood or bleeding “sudden and severe attack” Cerebrovascular Accident (CVA) Incidence of Stroke 3rd Leading cause of death and disability behind heart disease and cancer Annual incidence 2 per every 1,000 5 million survivors of stroke in any given year 65 and over increases with age Causes of