Speech Therapy Services

The sole goal of Speech Therapy is to help kids communicate their needs, wants, and desires. From learning to babble to producing words, phrases, and sentences, speech therapy enhances a child's ability to communicate! Divine Speech is here to help educate parents about talking and teaching kids in their natural learning environments through play-based intervention and ADLs (Activities of Daily Living).

Apraxia of Speech often camouflages itself as a severe articulation difficulty. Apraxia of Speech occurs at the level of the motor planning disorder ocurring at the level of motor cortex in the brain. The motor cortex sends a signal to the lips, tongue, and jaw for speech, but on the way down from down brain, the signal gets scrambled resulting in distorted speech, often unintelligible to others. 

Articulation skills have to do with the ability to appropriately utilize the articulators: the lips, tongue, and jaw, in a succinct pattern that allows for intelligible speech…Speech that is easily understood by others. In speech therapy, we teach children to use their articulators so they are understood by same age peers, teachers, and parents.

Sometimes children experience difficulty drinking from a bottle or sippy cup, chewing food, and even swallowing of food. Speech therapists can help enhance eating abilities for increasing nutritional intake and consumption of daily meals.

Did you know stuttering can be hereditary? Not always, but it often occurs on the paternal side of the family. Stuttering is difficulty moving fluently in speech often with repetition or hesitation, from one sound, syllable, word, phrase, or sentence to the next. Speech therapy teaches techniques called "diaphragmatic breathing" to increase more fluent, stutter-free speech.

Receptive language is comprehension and understanding. A Speech Pathologist helps a child understand information through specialized techniques including repetition of information, following directions and instructions, and asking "WH" questions after listening to simple phrases, detailed sentences, and complex paragraphs.  

Expressive language skills are the way a person communicates both verbally and nonverbally. Verbally using words to express needs, wants, and desires. Also communicating with age- appropriate vocabulary to give information for labeling, requesting, and describing.

.