Speech Therapy

What Is Speech Therapy?

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Speech therapy is an intervention service that helps improve a child’s speech and ability to express and understand language. This also includes nonverbal language. A speech therapist performs these services.
                         
Speech therapy will involve two components. It helps coordinate the mouth in order to produce sounds to form words and sentences. It also helps with the understanding and expression of language.
                         
Some children have great pronunciation and can be early readers but still need speech therapy to work on improving pragmatic language or the process of using and body and verbal language appropriately in a social situation. Other children need speech therapy due to a brain injury or an infection that affects their ability to communicate. Services will usually begin at a young age and still continue as children enter school.
                         
Some speech therapy programs focus on swallowing and feeding because it's not uncommon for kids who have trouble talking also have some feeding challenges. Both eating and speech involve the fine motor aspects of the jaw, lips, and tongue.