How can our speech-language therapy services help you or an adult in your life?
DTC offers speech-language therapy services for adults with cognitive impairments and traumatic brain injuries. Speech-language therapy for adults targets specific elements of speech and/or swallowing to address the patient’s communication and feeding needs. The speech language pathologists collaborate with the patient and/or caregiver to determine areas of treatment as well as the need for adaptive equipment/techniques, such as an augmentative alternative communication device for communication or a modified diet for safe swallowing. The primary goal of speech therapy is to improve the patient’s ability to clearly communicate his/her wants and needs and/or promote a safe swallow while eating.
Speech-language skills that may need to be refined include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Accent Modification: altering pronunciation of typically used words and sounds to improve clarity of speech
- Articulation: forming clear speech sounds
- Expressive Speech: producing speech that communicates wants, needs, thoughts, and feelings
- Phonological Process: recognizing and producing speech sounds to make words
- Prosody: reading with intonation, phrasing, and expression
- Fluency: accuracy, speed, prosody of speech
- Reading: understanding printed text, silently or verbally
- Receptive Speech: understanding what is being said
- Quality of Voice: the characteristics of voice – clarity, volume, etc.
You or an adult in your life may benefit from speech-language therapy services if you experience one or more of the following:
- Changes in ability to communicate wants or needs
- Changes in production of voice volume – too loud or too quiet
- Changes in voice
- Decreased tolerance of a variety of food textures, flavors, etc.
- Difficulty communicating in social situations
- Difficulty communicating wants or needs
- Difficulty pronouncing words
- Difficulty reading or writing
- Difficulty swallowing
- Difficulty with speech sounds or pronunciations
- Slow or rapid speech
- Speech is difficult to understand
- Stuttered speech
- Substituting or omitting parts of words
- Unable to or struggles to imitate/produce sounds
- Unable to or struggles to understand verbal instructions
- Unable to or struggles to verbally respond to instructions
COMMON DIAGNOSES
- Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS)
- Apraxia of speech (AOS)
- Articulation disorders
- Autism spectrum disorder (ASD)
- Age-related speech deficits
- Cognitive disorders
- Dysarthria
- Expressive aphasia
- Feeding and swallowing disorders
- Fluency disorders
- Multiple sclerosis
- Oral-motor weakness
- Parkinson’s
- Receptive aphasia
- Stroke
- Stuttering
- Traumatic brain injury (TBI)
- Voice disorders