Areas of expertise

Pediatric

Beyond Speech provides high quality evaluations and evidence based interventions for children and adults with speech, language, and/or communication disorders. Family members play a key role in our team-based approach and are involved every step of the way. Working hand-in-hand with families, and/or caregivers, our therapists make sure every individual gets the support and state-of-the-art services they need to succeed.

Beyond Speech therapists have a range of experiences, including, but not limited to:

• Developmental Delays: The term is used to describe when a child's progression through predictable developmental phases slows, stops, or reverses. Symptoms include slower than typical development of motor, cognitive, language, social, and emotional skills, although the milestones achieved are in the anticipated order.


• Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD): ASD is a neurological and developmental disorder that affects how people interact with others, communicate, learn, and behave. People with ASD often have difficulty with verbal and non verbal communication and interaction with other people, restricted interests and repetitive behaviors, symptoms that affect their ability to function in school, work, and other areas of life.


• Social (Pragmatic) Communication Disorder (SCD): SCD is characterized by difficulties with the use of verbal and nonverbal language for social purposes. Primary difficulties are in social interaction, social cognition, and pragmatics.


• Language Disorders or Impairments: Language Disorders or Impairments involve the processing of linguistic information, and can be detected in one or more language aspects such as phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics. They might be receptive (involving language comprehension), expressive (involving language production) or a combination of both. Examples include Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) in children, and aphasia in adults. Language disorders or impairments can affect both spoken and written language.


• Speech Disorders: Speech Disorders involve difficulty in creating, forming, or producing the speech sounds needed to communicate with others. Common speech disorders may include articulation disorders (atypical production of speech sounds interfering with intelligibility), phonological disorders, fluency disorders (interruption in the flow of speaking characterized by atypical rate, rhythm, and repetitions in sounds, syllables, words, and phrases), voice or resonance disorders (abnormal production and /or absences of vocal quality, pitch, loudness, resonance, duration).


• Articulation Disorder: An articulation disorder is related to difficulty in producing speech sounds. Speech sounds can be substituted, omitted, added, or changed. Most children exhibit some typical substitutions, omissions, additions, changes, during their development. However, an articulation disorder results when misarticulations keep occurring past a certain age.


• Phonological Disorder: Phonological disorders involve patterns of speech sound errors. Examples include substituting sounds made in the back of the mouth (e.g., /k/ and /g/) for those in the front of the mouth (e.g., /t/ and /d/), such as "tup" for "cup" or "das" for "gas". While it is common for children to exhibit phonological patterns, those patterns are not expected as children grow up.


• Apraxia of Speech: Apraxia of speech is a motor-speech disorder characterized by the inability to perform learned (familiar) movements on command, even though the command is understood and there is a willingness to perform the movement. Both the desire and the capacity to move are present but the individual simply cannot execute the act. In order for speech to occur, messages need to go from the brain to the mouth. These messages tell the articulators how and when to move to produce sounds. In individuals with apraxia of speech there is insufficient motor programming, and coordination of the articulators. The individuals might not be able to move their articulators (e.g., lips, tongue, jaw) in the right ways, even though their muscles are not weak. Sometimes, the individual might not be able to say much at all due to difficulty coordinating the muscle movements necessary for speech.


• Dysarthria of Speech: Dysarthria is a motor speech disorder resulting from impaired movement of the muscles used for speech production, including the lips, tongue, vocal folds, and/or diaphragm. The type and severity of dysarthria depends on which area of the nervous system is affected. A person with dysarthria may demonstrate characteristics such as "slurred" or "mumbled" speech that may be difficult to understand, slow rate of speech, rapid rate of speech with a "mumbling" quality, limited tongue, lip, and jaw movement, abnormal pitch and rhythm when speaking and/or changes in voice quality, such as hoarse or breathy voice or speech that sounds "nasal" or "stuffy".


• Fluency Disorders: Fluency disorders consist of interruptions in the flow of speaking characterized by atypical rate, rhythm, and disfluencies (e.g., repetitions of sounds, syllables, words, and phrases; sound prolongations; and blocks), which may also be accompanied by excessive tension, speaking avoidance, struggle behaviors, and secondary mannerisms. Also, people with fluency disorders frequently experience psychological, emotional, social, and functional impacts, as a result of their communication disorders.


• Auditory Processing Disorder (APD): APD refers to the ways in which the central nervous system uses auditory information, while the individual's hearing ability remains intact. APD is not the result of any higher order cognitive, language, or other related disorder. Children with APD might make complaints that relate to difficulty in understanding speech in noisy environments, following directions, discriminating (or telling the difference) between similar speech sounds. In school, children with APD might find difficulty in spelling, reading, and understanding information verbally presented in the classroom. Sometimes, they might behave as if a hearing loss is present, asking for repetitions, and/or clarifications.


• Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD): ADHD is one of the most common neurodevelopmental disorders of childhood that lasts into adulthood. Children with ADHD may have trouble paying attention, controlling impulsive behaviors, or be overly active.


• Learning Disorders/Learning Disabilities: Learning disabilities are neurologically-based processing problems. These processing problems can interfere with learning basic skills such as reading, writing and/or math. They can also interfere with higher level cognitive skills, such as organization, time planning, abstract reasoning, short or long term memory and attention.


• Hearing Loss: Hearing loss in children is often correlated with developmental delays in receptive and expressive communication skills, as well as learning disorders, that could be associated with poor academic performance.


• Feeding Disorders: A feeding disorder, in infancy or early childhood, is a child's refusal to eat certain food groups, textures, solids or liquids for a period of at least one month, which causes the child to not gain enough weight, grow naturally or cause any developmental delays.