Skip To Main Content

More Than Just Talk

 Speech Language Therapy: More Than Just Talk
When Speech Language Therapists refer to a students’s speech and language skills, there are many different components that are involved:

  • Speech Sound Production -  articulation, apraxia of speech, dysarthria

  • Fluency - stuttering, cluttering

  • Voice - phonation quality, pitch, loudness, respiration (voice may sound hoarse, breathy, nasal quality)

  • Cognition - word finding, sequencing, problem solving, executive functioning

  • Language (comprehension and expression)

    • Syntax (oral grammar) –  the actual structure of a person’s language; look at  conjunctions, sentence structure and order, regular and irregular verb usage, noun-verb agreement, etc.
    • Morphology – similar to syntax, but looks at the actual word parts, such as plurals –s, and -es, possessive -‘s, present progressive – ing and past tense verb ending –ed.
    • Semantics – refers to vocabulary, such as word meanings, analogies, antonyms, synonyms, associations, etc.
    • Phonology – refers to the sounds in words. Sound blending and segmentation, syllable deletion and addition, as well as rhyming are all considered phonological skills.
    • Wh- questions - refers to both correctly asking and answering wh- questions. 
    • Social Pragmatic Language Skills – also known as social skills and refers to one’s social and conversational skills.  This includes initaiting and maintaining conversations, knowing what to say, how to say it, when to say it and how to interact with others (perspecive taking skills).

     

    • *For more information about SLP role in schools, click here