Language Disorders

  • Expressive Language Disorder: With an expressive language disorder, a child has difficulty with using age-appropriate vocabulary, syntax, sentence length, and language to express wants, needs, feelings and knowledge.

  • Receptive Language Disorder: A child with a receptive language disorder may show difficulty with comprehension of spoken or written language - difficulty with understanding age-appropriate vocabulary or syntax, understanding directions and questions, and deeper comprehension of stories.

  • Social Communication Disorder: A social communication disorder is likely to cause difficulty with social aspects of language including conversational speech, topic maintenance, following “rules” of social language, and understanding/use of figurative language.

  • Phonological Disorder: A phonological disorder may present like an articulation disorder, however is based in the child’s understanding of how sounds go together and of aspects of sound production. Children with a phonological disorder will typically demonstrate the same pattern of speech across a class of sounds - for example, producing all “noisy sounds” (f, s, sh, v, z) as “stop sounds” (p, t, b, d).

Motor Speech Disorders

  • Articulation Disorder: An articulation disorder causes a child to have difficulty pronouncing words in an age-appropriate manner. Unlike with a phonological disorder, this is often rooted in the child’s inability to make the sound consistently, rather than a difficulty understanding the features of the sound.

  • Childhood Apraxia of Speech (CAS): Childhood Apraxia of Speech cannot be diagnosed positively until the age of 3, as a firm diagnosis requires a certain level of language acquisition. A child with CAS will have unpredictable sound errors, produce words differently each time, have trouble with vowel sounds, and have trouble with imitating speech. While a diagnosis cannot be confirmed before age 3, a child with suspected CAS may be treated with appropriate measures before this age.

Feeding Disorders

  • Pediatric Feeding Disorder (PFD): While some degree of selectivity or pickiness is not uncommon among children, feeding can sometimes become stressful for the whole family, limit a child’s nutritional intake, inhibit growth, or limit participation in social activities. When feeding is disordered to this degree, therapy can help a child to expand her diet, engage with new foods, and participate in family meals.

  • Oral Phase Dysphagia: A child with oral phase dysphagia may have difficulty with chewing, moving food around in the mouth, or creating a bolus (ball of food) in preparation for swallowing. This can be a standalone issue, one that accompanies pharyngeal phase dysphagia (described below, and called oropharyngeal dysphagia when both phases are affected), or occurs with feeding difficulties.

  • Pharyngeal Phase Dysphagia: The pharyngeal phase of eating begins with initiation of the swallow. Disorders in this phase may include coughing during meals, aspiration of food or liquid into the lungs, and difficulty initiating the swallow. Pharyngeal phase dysphagia may require thickening of liquids or alteration of flow rate in bottle-feeding babies. In younger children, it is managed by altering foods and monitoring the swallow. In older children and adults, strategies may be also be taught to make a typical diet safe or to strengthen the swallow.