Pediatric Services
At Garden State Speech Therapy, we tailor our therapy to help each client reach their maximum potential.
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Feeding Therapy
Our feeding therapy program offers comprehensive assessment, individualized treatment plans, a family-centered approach, multidisciplinary collaboration, and ongoing support.
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Speech & Language Therapy
Our team of experienced speech-language pathologists are committed to empowering our clients to overcome speech, language, voice, and swallowing disorders, enhancing their ability to express themselves and connect with the world.
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Occupational Therapy
Our expert occupational therapists work with children to address physical, cognitive, emotional, and environmental challenges that may hinder their ability to participate in meaningful activities.
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Social Skills
Socialization with others is a vital part of life. Our multidisciplinary team works with your child to improve conversation and listening skills, play and socialization, ability to make friends and share, understanding different intonations, reading body language, and staying on topic. We offer both individual and group social skills treatment.
What We Treat
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Speech development is a continuous process. As children grow and their speech matures, they are able to produce more and more sounds. However, for some children production of certain sounds continues to be difficult beyond the typical age of acquisition. Articulation therapy concentrates on teaching children to produce specific sounds.
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The term stuttering refers to disfluent (disrupted) speech production. Most people produce disfluent speech from time to time (think about fillers “um” and “like”) and for very young children some degree of disfluent speech is a part of language and speech development. Disfluent speech becomes an issue when it begins to affect child’s daily life. A speech-language pathologist trained in fluency therapy will work with the client and their family to teach techniques and adaptations that promote smooth speech.
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Voice therapy refers to an approach to treating disorders of vocal quality (how we sound). Voice therapy involves teaching specific vocal exercises coupled with behavioral changes to achieve the best possible voice and to relieve the vocal symptoms.
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Language therapy is concerned not with how we sound, rather with what we are trying to say. In order to communicate effectively we need to be able to understand other people (receptive language skills). We also need to be able to express our thoughts, ideas, and feeling completely and effectively (expressive language skills). There are multitude of reasons behind language disorders, some have well understood causes, while others have no apparent causes at all. Language therapy concentrates on targeting specific receptive and expressive language deficits in order to help us communicate effectively.
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Executive function skills are the core set of cognitive skills required for our daily functioning. These skills are responsible for planning, executing, and completing all tasks that comprise our daily lives. These skills are also necessary for us to be able to control our behavior (e.g. attention, motivation, and emotional regulation). Executive function skills play an important role in how we initiate and maintain communication exchanges with people around us. These cognitive skills are gradually developed from childhoodLEARN MORE and young adulthood. A speech-language pathologist trained in EF remediation will work on identifying what skills are adversely impacting effective communications and work on developing these skills.
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Orofacial Myofunctional Disorders refer to unproductive adaptations to atypical patterns of movement of oral structures. A most commonly known OMD is tongue thrust, which affects feeding and swallowing and may affect speech production (e.g. frontal lisp). Orofacial myofuctional therapy in conjunction with medical/orthodontic treatments can be an effective tool in correcting many orofacial dysfunctions such as habitual open mouth posture. A speech-language pathologist trained in OMT will work with clients to develop a targeted exercise program to remediate the atypical patterns.
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Childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) is a motor speech disorder that makes it difficult for children to speak. Children with the diagnosis of apraxia of speech generally have a good understanding of language and know what they want to say.
