Speech therapy for toddlers

A lot of people do not even know that this type of therapy even exists. There are even people who do know about it but doubt that it can do any good. Probably the most interesting thing about speech therapy is that people who have problems with speaking and are looking into options for speech development almost never consider this type of therapy as their first option.

What is speech therapy?

This type of therapy is a treatment that helps those who have certain problems with their speech. Those who need this type of therapy the most are usually toddlers. This is a treatment where not just the speech is the target as a subset of speech pathology. All the problems including communication and language these people might have are targeted. In most cases people are born with these problems but it is not uncommon that a person develops them in some sort of an accident or inhumane social environment. What does speech therapy aims to achieve?

The aim of speech therapy is to develop or reattain effective communication skills a person is lacking. Since not all people have the same problems, the level of language development or recovery will depend on how big the problem is. This particularly refers to those people who already have acquired deficiencies because it may be impossible for them to get back to the level of speech they were once on.

Types of speech problems

Problems that require speech therapy are sorted into three groups. Articulation disorders, voice or resonance disorders and fluency disorders. For each of these disorders a different technique is used.

Articulation disordersPeople who suffer from this type of disorder usually have a problem which stems from some secondary physical feature involved in speech. This problem can affect one element or a combination of elements. These are palate, either soft or hard, tongue, jaws, teeth, cheeks or lips. Because of this people have problems when they need to pronounce the words or syllables properly.

Voice or resonance disordersThis disorder does not stem from the secondary physical speech feature but the first, which are the larynx or the voice box. To the person who is listening to someone with this disorder he or she will sound nasally, muffled, either too weak or too loud.

Fluency disordersThis disorder does not occur because of some physical feature. A person with fluency disorder rather clutters the words because he or she is talking way too fast. The other situation is when a person speaks too slow so his or her sentences are full of stoppages, fillers, repetitions or unneeded prolongation.

How is speech therapy provided?

A speech and language pathologist or a speech therapist may provide the therapy if the professional level is required. If there is no need to be that professional a person under the guidance of an SPL can provide the therapy.