Google review, Brooklyn LettersBrooklyn Letters

1139 Prospect Avenue, Brooklyn

4.9 56 reviews

  • Google review, Brooklyn Letters Emily Matles ★★★★★ a week ago
    We would highly recommend Ally! Our son always asks about her, so very thankful to Brooklyn Letters for introducing us.
    ~ Emily, mom of Brooklyn 2 year old
  • Google review, Brooklyn Letters T Ainsley ★★★★★ 5 months ago
    I cannot express how grateful and rewarding my experience with Brooklyn Letters has been. Her tutor Ms. Daria is so knowledgeable, amazing, kind and awesome. My daughter has made so much progress in Literacy and Math and it's all … More thanks to Ms. Daria. I know my daughter is sad that she can no longer work with Ms. Daria, as she looked forward to their sessions every week. Thank you again!
  • Google review, Brooklyn Letters Natalie Levon ★★★★★ 4 months ago
    Nicole has been an amazing therapist!! She played a tremendous role in our daughter’s speech progress and overall development. She has come such a long way and we are so happy with the therapy she received!
  • Google review, Brooklyn Letters Colin Peters ★★★★★ 6 months ago
    We could not be happier with the services Valerie provided! She is very thoughtful and knowledgeable and provided significant guidance to support our daughter's speech development outside of our scheduled sessions. She established … More a great working relationship with her, and she will definitely be missed! Your business model is amazing and it was an absolute pleasure working with Valerie. I've referred your organization and Valerie to the Executive Director of our daughter's school and friends/colleagues who are in need of speech therapy services.
  • Google review, Brooklyn Letters Lil Amatore ★★★★★ 7 months ago
    Christina was absolutely wonderful. She went out of her way to win my son over and it worked. He looked forward to her visits and his speech improved so much under her care. She was super flexible and it’s clear she truly cares. We adore … More Christina and we’re going to miss her. Almost sad he improved so much! She’s simply amazing and we can’t say enough how great she is. I would recommend her services to anyone and everyone, without hesitation. Thank you so much for connecting us with her!
  • Google review, Brooklyn Letters Heather Liljengren ★★★★★ a year ago
    We cannot say enough good things about Effie, the ASL teacher, who was so engaged and effective with our 2 year old daughter from the very first session! Effie gladly included our whole family in the sessions! Her expertise and fantastic … More personality gave our daughter a way to communicate that she was so desperately seeking. The coordinators at Brooklyn Letters were so helpful and communicative…I would highly recommend their services!
  • Google review, Brooklyn Letters Brigid Bower ★★★★★ 11 months ago
    Samantha Dalmas was fantastic! We saw her for a feeding therapy evaluation and while she doesn’t think my daughter needs more feeding therapy sessions at this time, but she gave me lots of tips to try. If my daughter's doctors want … More to see more progress at her next appointment, I wouldn’t hesitate to reach out to Samantha again.
  • Google review, Brooklyn Letters Duygu Başaran ★★★★★ 11 months ago
    Brooklyn Letters was recommended to me through a friend's speech therapist friend in NJ. The articulation evaluation for my daughter went well. We were pleased with Kristin's services.
  • Google review, Brooklyn Letters Kelley Peters-Patel ★★★★★ a year ago
    Melissa was wonderful. Our daughter warmed to her immediately and by the time she left, had already started "practicing" some of the techniques Melissa had shown her. I will not hesitate at all to reach out to Melissa again, should … More the need arise.
  • Google review, Brooklyn Letters R Elmore ★★★★★ a year ago
    Aileen was INCREDIBLY helpful to us, both in assessing possible origins of my grandson's food aversions, as well as informing us of various available interventions to consider.
    I can’t thank you and Brooklyn Letters enough for connecting
    … More us with Aileen. In all our feeding therapy journey we have not gotten anything near the kind of benefit that we did from her. Her knowledge, professionalism, and responsiveness have put us on the path of progress with my grandson and has also made us feel genuinely well cared for.
  • Google review, Brooklyn Letters Christine Weiher ★★★★★ 2 years ago
    We were amazed with Allison! She met my son at 2 1/2 years old, not speaking much at all, and over a computer, and she was able to develop a bond and friendship, so much so that he would look forward to his weekly computer time with Allison. … More I was not sure how the speech therapy would go- but we are so happy that we tried it out and continued. It allowed my son to gain confidence in his speech, make a new friend :), and also give him the skills and a bit of understanding of how to shape his mouth or where to place his tongue to make the proper sounds. We were extremely happy with Allison- she was fantastic to work with.
  • Google review, Brooklyn Letters Andrea Saffady ★★★★★ 2 years ago
    My sessions with Karen have been extremely helpful. My speech has improved tremendously. In fact, I just finished 2 hours of conducting interviews with a consulting client via MS Teams and I have an upcoming conference call. Both my … More neurologist and neurosurgeon remarked about how good my speech is. Much of the day it is perfect, although I still have some rough spots when I get tired or speak too quickly. One of my granddaughters is a speech pathology student at Ithaca College. She sat in on 2 sessions while she was home for winter break, and she was very impressed with Karen.
  • Google review, Brooklyn Letters Jacob B ★★★★★ 4 years ago
    We were delighted with Christie. First, and most importantly, our son made great strides under her guidance. So great, that we felt he no longer needed help! She was incredibly patient and kind with him and our son really responded to … More her. Christie was also great with me and my wife. She provided thorough and informative updates on our son's progress and which exercises she was using with him, so we could reinforce what she was teaching him. All in all, we had a fabulous experience with Christie and would highly recommend her.
  • Google review, Brooklyn Letters Jessica C ★★★★★ a year ago
    Theo was wonderful and his work with my son has produced some progress. I am grateful for the services Theo provided.
  • Google review, Brooklyn Letters Melissa Stevens ★★★★★ 2 years ago
    Highly recommend Jill. She is a total pleasure to work with. After a few months working with Jill, my son is reading above grade level and LOVES to read. Mission accomplished!
  • Google review, Brooklyn Letters Demet Evren ★★★★★ 2 years ago
    Paige was great and we had been really happy with her. I would highly recommend her! I recommend Brooklyn Letters to whomever asks for a speech therapist.
  • Google review, Brooklyn Letters Jeizel Rosenthal ★★★★★ 2 years ago
    Isabel was WONDERFUL and our son absolutely adored her, and he is making great progress with his reading and writing.
  • Google review, Brooklyn Letters Lesley Duval ★★★★★ 3 years ago
    Theo was fantastic with our 4yo son. We were very worried that his progress would fall off when we had to switch to remote sessions, but Theo kept our son happy and engaged through the screen. Highly highly recommend!
  • Google review, Brooklyn Letters Samantha Packard ★★★★★ 3 years ago
    We've been working with Theo from Brooklyn Letters for close to 4 months now and the results are apparent; our daughter has vastly improved her speech in a relatively short amount of time. We make "Theo Day" a celebration … More in our house with pancakes for breakfast, and the enthusiasm is matched in the sessions. Theo is fun, patient, professional, and caring, and he gives us the tools to take the lessons beyond the session. Thank you Theo, and Brooklyn Letters, for helping our daughter express herself.
  • Google review, Brooklyn Letters Travis Ricca ★★★★★ 3 years ago
    I worked with Alina to enhance my pronunciation, tone, and pacing while communicating socially and in a work environment. She was great to work with and clear about goals and learning objectives. The improvement from day 1 has been tremendous! … More
  • Google review, Brooklyn Letters Enrico Bermudez ★★★★★ 3 years ago
    Cathy has been excellent with us and our son. We will sorely miss her. He has improved significantly with Cathy’s help. Cathy was a true partner with us, especially as we pursued additional help through our son’s school system.
  • Google review, Brooklyn Letters Kayne Elisabeth Wilk ★★★★★ 4 years ago
    We really loved working with Alina, she is so fantastic. Patient yet firm, and determined the best course of action very clearly and succintly for us. And it all transitioned so well to Zoom as well. I will definitely be back in touch for … More services for our other child after summer break!
  • Google review, Brooklyn Letters Jen S ★★★★★ 4 years ago
    Vera was amazing! My 11 yo daughter made progress so quickly and really looked forward to her sessions. She was kept motivated and engaged.
  • Google review, Brooklyn Letters susie tofte ★★★★★ 3 years ago
    The work that Allison P. did with our daughter over the years has been invaluable to us. Our daughter had such a good relationship with Allison, and it allowed them to work really well together - even remotely these past 6 months. This … More year, Allison went above and beyond by helping us throughout the neuropsych eval we did, trying to re-open our daughter's IEP at her school, and eventually landing her at our chosen school. She was in contact with our daughter's teachers, with the neuropsychologist, and made herself available as a reference to speak on behalf of our daughter's learning differences.
    Allison stopped by our house last week to give our daughter cupcakes and say goodbye, and I literally cried with appreciation for what an amazing speech therapist she has been. She has been our daughter's biggest champion. The new families that she will work with this year are lucky to have her.
  • Google review, Brooklyn Letters Alicia Perez-Katz ★★★★★ 4 years ago
    Sydney was great! Our son was sad to end his sessions with her, which says a lot. We appreciated her honest assessment of his skill level, and he now has materials to self monitor and practice. Thank you!
  • Google review, Brooklyn Letters Kristin Ames ★★★★★ 4 years ago
    Our experience with Theo was terrific. Theo was great with my son. He developed a positive relationship with him based on sincerity, respect, trust and a deep personal connection. In their lessons, Theo was encouraging, creative and kind. … More He helped our son understand how to differentiate the sounds he made when he spoke, and gave him great exercises to practice every week between lessons. Our son was sorry to have the lessons come to an end, but recognized that Theo had helped him as much as possible and it was time for him to stop. Theo explained to him (and us) how to keep working to get the last 5%, and encouraged him to keep working on the exercises on his own. I have recommended Theo to another parent who noticed my son's improvement and inquired for her own son.
    We are all grateful to have gotten to know Theo, and we greatly appreciate all the work he did to help our son.
  • Google review, Brooklyn Letters Aisha Holder ★★★★★ 4 years ago
    "I have nothing but wonderful things to say about Michelle Macroy-Higgins. We are extremely pleased with her work with our daughter. I was so grateful for my daughter to have a speech therapist who is a researcher (specialty in late … More talkers), graduate professor and practitioner. Her expertise was clearly evident in our conversations and work with our daughter. She was very responsive to my questions and often sent articles and other materials about language development that I found helpful. Thankfully, my daughter's speech improved tremendously. Michelle developed such a warm relationship with my daughter. My daughter was always excited to see Michelle and would greet her at the door with a big hug. Lastly, I would add that Michelle always demonstrated empathy with me as a mother who was initially worried about her daughter's language development. I could go on and on about how pleased we were with Michelle's work."
  • Google review, Brooklyn Letters Andrea Peartree ★★★★★ 4 years ago
    Theo is a wonderful Clinton Hill speech therapist. We were really pleased with him. Our son showed drastic improvement, not only in his speech but in his confidence.
  • Google review, Brooklyn Letters mario costa ★★★★★ 4 years ago
    Alexa has been an enthusiastic, reliable, well prepared and caring teacher for our 6 year old daughter. She has been able to improve and increase our daughter's confidence lesson by lesson with patience and competence; through varied … More and productive didactic practice. Alexa has engaged our daughter in several activities that always kept her motivated and eager to learn literacy. My wife and I, both of us are educators, feel so fortunate to have had the opportunity to observe Alexa's pedagogical skills. Alexa has had a big impact on our daughter literacy growth. Thank you Brooklyn Letters!
  • Google review, Brooklyn Letters Lily Alt ★★★★★ 4 years ago
    We were absolutely DELIGHTED with Marsha's services. She was wonderful. We found her to be kind, fun, engaging, very knowledgeable. She provided us with clear instructions and additional written handouts each week. She engaged our … More son with different techniques and toys, and showed us how to use her techniques when we were interacting with him. I actually just texted her on Saturday - Our son finally said "more" - one of the target words we had been working on with her. It was a total joy to hear, and I had to share it with her - she wrote back immediately to congratulate us. I am so appreciative of her expertise, and wish we could have seen her for longer. I recommended her to another family in our neighborhood who is looking for a speech therapist.

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MANHATTAN, NYC SPEECH THERAPY FOR PRONUNCIATION ENUNCIATION ARTICULATION

What is Speech therapy Pronunciation Enunciation Articulation 1

MANHATTAN, NYC SPEECH THERAPY FOR PRONUNCIATION ENUNCIATION ARTICULATION

What is Speech therapy Pronunciation Enunciation Articulation 1
As Featured In:

Our Speech Therapists Travel To Your Manhattan, NYC Home! Private Pay In-Person and Remote Speech Therapy Pronunciation Enunciation Articulation | Free Consultations & Meet-and-Greets With Our Staff | No Contracts, Pay As You Go!

Our Speech Therapists Travel To Your Manhattan, NYC Home! Private Pay In-Person and Remote Speech Therapy Pronunciation Enunciation Articulation | Free Consultations & Meet-and-Greets With Our Staff | No Contracts, Pay As You Go!
WE TRAVEL TO THE FOLLOWING MANHATTAN NEIGHBORHOODS
Battery Park City Central Midtown Chelsea Chinatown Clinton East Village Financial District Flatiron District Garment District Gramercy Park Greenwich Village Harlem Hell’s Kitchen Hudson Square Kips Bay Little Italy Lower East Side Midtown Murray Hill SOHO Sutton Place Theatre District Times Square TriBeCa Turtle Bay Union Square Upper East Side Upper West Side West Village and More!
We also travel to:
The Bronx Riverdale Yonkers
Our Speech-Language Pathologists and Therapists

We travel to you, and we also offer remote services. Some of our speech-language pathologists are trained in the Orton Gillingham approach. Many of our speech-language pathologists are trained in literacy and offer support with decodingspelling, and reading fluency services. Our speech-language pathologists and therapists work with babies, toddlers, school-age students, and adults with expertise in:

Our Speech-Language Pathologists and Therapists

We travel to you, and we also offer remote services. Some of our speech-language pathologists are trained in the Orton Gillingham approach. Many of our speech-language pathologists are trained in literacy and offer support with decodingspelling, and reading fluency services. Our speech-language pathologists and therapists work with babies, toddlers, school-age students, and adults with expertise in:

Training/Certifications
Training/Certifications
TESTIMONIALS

I am so grateful to her.
Amy is a fantastic speech therapist, reading strategist, and confidence-builder! My now-7-year-old son was having difficulty with enunciation, and, perhaps relatedly, hesitating to try reading aloud. I was concerned about taking him to a speech therapist because I did not want to make him (more) self-conscious. A year ago, Craig at Brooklyn Letters recommended Amy, and the whole family has come to rely on her. My 7-year old’s speech is much clearer than it was, and Amy has taught him a bunch of different strategies to try if he is unsure how to make a sound or read a word, which greatly reinforced his reading learning at school. Amy saw immediately how to win my shy son’s confidence (ask him to explain how to play chess to her), and targeted her strategies to his strengths (numbers and sports!) so that he could work on the new skills while feeling good about himself. My son looks forward to Amy’s weekly visits immensely (it is also really helpful that she comes to our house!). Amy recently told me that she thought he was ready to graduate from their sessions, and I immediately felt like this would be a real loss for him and for me as a parent because I have so come to value Amy’s advice. So I persuaded her to work with him once a week on Spanish (Amy is bi-lingual), which he has just begun at school, and on homework strategies. I am so grateful to her.

- Deidre

Vera was truly an amazing therapist and really helped our son with all his articulation issues.
She was enthusiastic, organized, thoughtful, and creative when it came to teaching him, and he looked forward to their lessons every week. I would highly recommend her to anyone that is looking for a therapist.

- Jo L.

Brooklyn Letters was recommended to me through a friend's speech therapist friend in NJ. The articulation evaluation for my daughter went well. We were pleased with Kristin's services.

- Duygu Başaran

This was my first evaluation of this kind and I had no idea what to expect. I thought Katherine was great, she walked me through the assessment and explained things as we went along. Really made for a great experience!

~ Jessica, Manhattan adult articulation client

I cannot tell you how lucky I feel to have found Amy. Someone recommended Amy after my daughter’s first speech therapist decided she needed a little more help than she could provide. Needless to say, Amy swooped in and literally made everything better. She was down-to-earth, extremely reliable, and more than competent. The little girl who used to cry because she didn’t talk well, now won’t shut up. Now her speech and pronunciation are just where they should be along with her confidence. And she misses Amy a lot. We are all so grateful for her care and support.

- Ashley

Wonderful Experience. Suzanne worked with our 4-year old son for several months on fluency and pronunciation issues. He made remarkable progress with her and we were extremely pleased with Suzanne’s professionalism, warmth, knowledge, and attentiveness. Our son soon learned to love and look forward to her visits and she was extremely thorough in working with us to explain the process and go through our questions. We wholeheartedly recommend her.

- Rayna
Though it’s endearing to listen to your child’s early speech efforts, if they continue to struggle with pronouncing sounds past a specific age, they might be experiencing a speech sound disorder. Recognizing the four stages of speech development is crucial in this context.

A Few Terms to Understand

Chronological Age – The child’s actual age (for example: 12 months, 3 years).

Linguistic Age – Refers to how the child’s vocabulary, grammar, and social use of words compare to peers. For example, a child might have a chronological age of 3:3, but his or her expressive language skills could be at the 2:9 level, indicating a six-month gap. This six-month gap indicates that his or her speech production skills should be at the 2:9 level, not the 3:3 year mark. Determining this gap, if there is one, is imperative when evaluating for speech sound disorders.

What are Speech Sound Disorders?

As children develop their language skills, they learn to produce sounds. Most children say /p/, /m/, and /w/ early on, while sounds like /r/, /l/, or “th” often take longer to master. By four years old, children can produce and say the majority of speech sounds correctly.

When a child is having difficulties with a sound that should have been mastered based on the child’s chronological and linguistic ages, it might be an indication of a speech sound disorder. This may either be an articulation disorder or a phonological disorder.

Speech Sound Disorders 1536x1536 1

What are the Most Common Speech Sound Disorders?

Articulation Disorder – This affects children’s speech on a phonetic and motoric level, which means they have trouble saying individual speech sounds, e.g. consonants and vowels. For example, when a child cannot produce the /l/ sound, when he or she should be able to produce it based on the chronological and linguistic ages, and does not show a systematic error pattern (see below for phonological disorder), one can then assume that it is an articulation disorder.

Phonological Disorder – This disorder occurs at the phonemic/linguistic/cognitive levels (a level higher than the phonetic/motoric aspects of speech production. Children with a phonological disorder show systematic patterns with their speech production errors, e.g. consistently delete /m/ in initial sounds, by saying “at” for “mat” or “ad” for “mad” for CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) words, when the age error is unexpected for the child’s chronological and linguistic ages.

Other speech sounds disorders are dysarthria and apraxia, which are significantly more uncommon speech sound disorders compared to articulation and phonological disorders. Here is everything you want to know about treatment approaches for speech sound disorders.

How to Tell if a Child has Difficulty with Articulation?

If a child has articulation problems, they may:

  • Become excessively frustrated when communicating with others.
  • Producing speech that is difficult to understand, even for familiar listeners.
  • When learning new words, tend to use only vowel sounds (very open-mouthed noises).
  • Produces speech that is less clear than other children of the same age.
  • Produce an interdental lisp (e.g., tongue protruding between the teeth when saying a /s/ or /z/ sound) if over the ages of 3.5 – 4 years.
  • Be school-aged and still having difficulty with producing clear sounds. The last sounds to develop are voice and voice-less “th.”
PBS.Org Average Number of Words Produced
  • At 15 months= 14 words
  • 18 months= 68 words
  • 23 months= 200 words
  • 24 months- 200 to 300 words                Dr. Rhea Paul, Ph. D.
  • 30 months= 570 words
PBS.Org Average Number of Words Produced
  • At 15 months= 14 words
  • 18 months= 68 words
  • 23 months= 200 words
  • 24 months- 200 to 300 words Dr. Rhea Paul, Ph. D.
  • 30 months= 570 words

Foundational Skills to Build Articulation

  • Attention and concentration: Sustained effort, listening and doing activities without distraction and being able to hold that effort long enough to get the task done (e.g., being able to attend to speech and sounds long enough to be able to process the information).
  • Hearing: For detection of speech sounds.
  • Good middle ear functioning most of the time (e.g., a child with ongoing ear infections, ‘glue ear’ or colds which block the ears may have fluctuating hearing levels which can affect speech).
  • Process speech sounds, identify and hear differences between sounds.
  • Discriminating sounds

WARNING:

Despite being uncommon in children, many speech pathologists misdiagnose children’s speech production errors due to the lack of understanding between phonology, morphology/syntax, and speech production skills. Many speech pathologists focus only on the motoric aspects of speech production. The reason for this divide in the field of speech language pathology is because there is variability in training at the Masters and Post-Masters Degree levels. Likewise, there is growing pressure placed on speech pathologists, particularly private therapists, to use commercialized products that are not backed up by research. Many parents ask for these products and commercialized programs because that is what they have been told to do.

What Causes Speech Sound Disorders?

Speech sound disorders can also occur in adults, which typically start from childhood or after a stroke or traumatic brain injury. However, they are the most common when children learn speech sounds and cannot produce the correct speech production sounds on their own. Most of the time we do not know what causes speech sound disorders. Speech production is simply something we take for granted. Most of the children we work with cannot master certain sounds on their own, so they need a boost in how to correctly enunciate these sounds. This is how we can help your child!

Other possible causes of speech sound disorders in children include:

  • most of the time it’s unknown;
  • autism and other developmental disorders;
  • genetic syndromes, such as Down syndrome;
  • hearing loss (from ear infections or other causes); and,
  • brain damage caused by injuries or conditions like cerebral palsy.

How to Treat Speech Sound Disorders

In addressing speech sound disorders, it is crucial to test a child for hearing loss as it can interfere with speech and language development. Just because a child detects sounds, it does not mean they are processing these sounds. Pediatricians do not perform full audiological evaluations. An audiologist must rule out any hearing issues, such as undetected ear infections, which can negatively impact speech language development. We have worked with many children who had undetected hearing issues and surprised their parents when their hearing test uncovered hearing loss (most of the time it is temporary hearing loss and easily treatable).

  • Toddlers:
    Speech sound development is strongly tied to the child’s expressive language abilities and toddlers who are hard to understand can be unintelligible for many reasons. A delay in expressive vocabulary and a delay in stringing words together is usually accompanied by a delay in the sound acquisition and decreased speech intelligibility. Therapy typically focuses on increasing the child’s expressive vocabulary and helping the child increase the complexity of what they say. As the child’s vocabulary expands, the number and variety of sounds increase and the toddler is more understood. For toddlers with a limited sound repertoire, we teach early developing sounds to start building the foundation for learning words. Some toddlers are talkative but they are hard to understand. They may need help acquiring early developing sounds and/or eliminating atypical sound errors. Some toddlers can say a lot of words and they are well understood, but they need help using their words in the right environment. Here, the therapy focuses on social language use.
  • Preschoolers:
    Therapy may focus on increasing the child’s vocabulary and the complexity of what they say, facilitating their underlying speech development. Some preschoolers need help learning age-appropriate sounds and/or reducing speech error patterns, e.g., the child says tiss, for kiss, even though the child can say the k sound.
  • School Age:
    For students who don’t have significant expressive language issue, speech therapy typically focuses on teaching later developing sounds, e.g. th, l, and r, reducing sound distortions, e.g., lisp, and resolving any remaining speech error pattern(s) not exhibited by peers.

A speech-language pathologist can then help correct the child’s speech problems. The SLP will conduct a series of tests to check how the child says sounds at various levels, e.g. sound, syllable, word, sentence, etc., and in varying contexts in words, e.g. initial, medial, final, within clusters/blends, and more. We also check out the context of the child’s movements of their articulator’s: lips, jaw, and tongue in varying phonetic/linguistic contexts.

Likewise, it is crucial to test a child’s language skills to see if the speech problem is linked to a language disorder based on his or her linguistic age. This is a bit complicated to break down, but we can certainly explain this connection to you. As previously stated, many speech language pathologists do not connect the speech production dots to language skills. Often, this leads them to misdiagnose and look too myopically at why a child is incorrectly producing sounds. We break down all systems so your child will have an accurate assessment. Assessments guide treatment, which will save you money.

ROARING WITH THE R SOUND
Mastering the Art of Pronunciation
Speech Intelligibility

The term intelligibility refers to ‘speech clarity’ or the proportion of a speaker’s output that a listener can readily understand. In typical development, as children learn to talk, their comprehensibility to those around them steadily increases. A key characteristic of children with speech sound disorders is that they are often significantly less intelligible than non-speech-impaired children of the same age.

In young children there is often quite a marked difference between single word (SW) and conversational speech (CS) intelligibility; between intelligibility to their close family members and intelligibility to unfamiliar listeners; and intelligibility in known versus unknown conversational topics. With regard to families, siblings may sometimes be more adept than parents in comprehending what their little brothers and sisters are saying.

Phonological Processes

The following infographics provides a rough guide to how clearly a child should be speaking in the age-ranges. It is important to bear in mind that there is a considerable individual variation between children. If, as a parent, you are in doubt about your own child’s speech sound development or speech clarity, an assessment by a speech-language pathologist/ speech and language therapist (SLP/SLT) will quickly tell you if your child is ‘on track’ and making the right combination of correct sounds and ‘errors’ for their age.

Speech Production Therapy for Children

After the assessment, if the child is deemed to need speech therapy, speech therapy starts with identifying which sound or sounds a child has trouble producing, the part of a word (beginning, middle, or ending) from which he or she is struggling to produce that sound, and, if phonological in nature, what sound or sounds he or she is omitting, substituting, etc. This analysis will also determine what type of words should be used to practice these sounds. The SLP also checks for stimulability and sound elicitation. Stimulability refers to a child’s ability to imitate a sound. If a child cannot repeat a modeled sound, the therapist will work on elicitation or teaching how to say the sound correctly. It is also possible that the child might not be ready to learn a certain sound. If this is the case, the SLP will focus on the next sound in succession and circle back to the unstimuliable sound at a later point.

Once established, the SLP can proceed with the hierarchy of speech therapy described below. Please take note that for phonological speech errors, the goals are to decrease the inappropriate phonological error(s) while increasing the correct production of the target sound(s).

  1. Isolation – Practicing saying a sound by itself (without adding vowels) until the child can accurately produce the sound on his or her own.
  2. Syllables – Adding a vowel before (initial syllable), after (final syllable), and before and after (medial syllable) the target sound. This exercise identifies in which position is easiest or hardest for the child to produce the target sound.
  3. Words – After learning to say the sound in syllables, the SLP uses the target sound in words. It can be the initial, medial, or final sound of the word, depending on which position needs addressing.
  4. Phrases / Sentences – The SLP may start with two- to three-word phrases before moving on to “rotating” sentences where only the target word changes. Children who cannot read yet use visual cues and memorization to practice sounds.
  5. Stories – Practicing sounds through stories makes it easier for children to transition to conversation. Children can practice the target sound while reading aloud. For those that cannot read yet, they make up or retell stories instead.
  6. Conversation – The child is encouraged to practice the target sounds and words during normal conversation with few errors and little correction from the therapist. This is a good way for the SLP to gauge the child’s progress.
  7. Generalization – The last phase of articulation therapy focuses on generalization across all language contexts. If the child still shows difficulty generalizing the target sound, the SLP can go back to practicing words, sentences, and stories.

MEET OUR MANHATTAN SPEECH LANGUAGE THERAPISTS AND PATHOLOGISTS WHO TRAVEL TO YOUR HOME

Alina G.
Alina G.
M.S. CCC-SLP/TSSLD, SPEECH-LANGUAGE PATHOLOGIST
Ben I
Ben I.
M.S., CCC- SLP, TSSLD, SPEECH LANGUAGE PATHOLOGIST
Kristin 2
Kristin
New York State bilingual (Spanish/ English) licensed Speech-Language Pathologist and certified Teacher of Students with Speech and Language Disabilities (TSSLD)
Staff 14 1
Sholom
MA, CCC-SLP, TSSLD, SPEECH LANGUAGE PATHOLOGIST
Samantha
Samantha
MA, CCC-SLP, TSSLD, SPEECH LANGUAGE PATHOLOGIST
Staff 12
Theo W.
M.S. CCC-SLP, Speech Language Pathologist
Staff 13 1
Rachel
M.S., CCC-SLP, TSSLD, QOM
Max
Ph.D., CCC-SLP, TSSLD

FREE CONSULTATION!!!
Call: (347) 394-3485,
Text: (917) 426-8880
Email: [email protected]
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