Sanford Pediatric Rehabilitation

Pediatric speech therapy

• Facilitate skills that a child needs to communicate functionally, either verbally or nonverbally, with those in his/her environment
• Promote adequate and safe nutrition/hydration and the oral sensory-motor skills associated with feeding and swallowing from infancy through adulthood
• Facilitate receptive/expressive language development underlying successful learning and social competence
• Assist families in promoting successful relationships through interactions during play, daily activities and across all environments

Pediatric speech therapy services at Sanford Health focus on the following areas:

Language delays/disorders: Language development consists of two areas:  expressive and receptive. Children may have an inability to express ideas and thoughts, put words in the correct order, learn grammatical rules  and develop vocabulary either through verbal or non-verbal communication (expressive language).

Children may also display difficulties in understanding what is being said to them, learning or applying basic concepts, being socially interactive with others or developing age appropriate communication (receptive language).

Speech delays/disorders: Difficulty producing certain speech sounds, ranging from one sound in error to unintelligible speech. This may include articulation and motor speech disorders including apraxia and dysarthria. Highly unintelligible children may demonstrate a phonological disorder which involves patterns of sound errors (consistently omits beginnings or ends of words, reduces consonant clusters, etc.)

Feeding/Swallowing disorders: Difficulty with oral-motor movement and sensation during feeding and or swallowing.  Symptoms may include coughing, choking, frequent fevers or upper respiratory issues, aversions to eating or failure to thrive.

Stuttering disorders:Speech that is characterized by excessive abnormal hesitations, sound or word repetitions and/or prolongation of sounds.  This can be normal during preschool years, as children are developing their language skills.

Voice disorders: Vocal quality characterized by hoarseness, breathiness, roughness, abnormal high/low pitch and/or decreased loudness  due to irritation of the vocal cords which may result in polyps or nodules.  This may result from ongoing vocal abuse including screaming, crying or talking excessively.

Social-cognitive-communication impairments:Deficits related to cognitive factors which may include attention, memory, and problem-solving and their relationship to appropriate social interactions.

In addition to the listed treatment areas above, Pediatric ST would be indicated for the following diagnoses or impairments:

• Velopharyngeal incompetency and cleft of the lip/palate
• Hearing impairments/cochlear implants
• Autism spectrum disorders (ASD)
• Genetic syndromes (e.g., Down syndrome, Williams syndrome, Turner syndrome, etc.)
• Augmentative or alternative communication needs
• Neurological disorders (e.g., traumatic brain injury, cerebral palsy, stroke, seizure disorders, encephalopathy)
• Prematurity (feeding/swallowing/communication development)
• Tracheotomies/ventilator dependent individuals (communication and eating)
• Literacy and pre-literacy difficulties
• Auditory processing disorders

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