Autism
Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder that affects a person’s nonverbal communication skills, and sometimes verbal communication skills as well. I have experience in teaching nonverbal and minimally verbal Autistic children to develop communication skills using a variety of methods of communication including verbal communication, nonverbal communication, and AAC.
I also have experience with adults improving social communication skills such as recognizing and responding to nonverbal and emotional cues in self and others, understanding subtle nonverbal communication methods such as humor, sarcasm, innuendo, and symbolic language such as figures of speech, and other social communication skills such as topic maintenance, conversational turn taking, listening and comprehension.
Childhood Apraxia of Speech
Childhood Apraxia of Speech (CAS) is a neurological speech sound disorder that affect a child’s intelligibility due to difficulty planning and programming the sequence and timing of muscles used for speech. Children with CAS may make unusual speech sound errors, may have inconsistent errors, and may have a jerky, halting quality to their speech.
Their speech is frequently exceptionally difficult to understand, especially in more severe cases. I have experience in diagnosing and treating CAS at many levels of development and in varying degrees of severity in Childhood Apraxia of Speech, from early childhood to early adulthood.
Fluency Disorders
Fluency disorders such as stuttering, cluttering, or other disruptions to fluent speech may involve speech that includes blocks, repetitions of sounds, word parts, words, or phrases, repetitions of filler words or sounds, or rates of speech that are perceived to be excessive or abnormal. Fluency disorders may involve a psychological, emotional, social, or functional impact. I have experience diagnosing and treating fluency disorders in a variety of ages and levels of severity.
Phonological Disorders
Phonological disorders are common speech sound patterns in children that persist past a typical period of development. Phonological disorders involve substituting a later developing sound with an earlier developing sound, and can disrupt intelligibility or garner stigma. Children with reduced intelligibility due to phonological disorders may experience frustration or other emotional distress and/or language delays, and they are at an increased risk for reading and literacy delays. I have experience treating phonological disorders from age 3 to teenage years.
Expressive and Receptive Language Disorders
Children with expressive or receptive language disorders may have problems making themselves understood or understanding others. Children with expressive language disorders may have difficulty with advanced vocabulary, delayed grammar or syntax, and/or difficulty using longer, more complex sentences. Children with receptive language disorders may have difficulty understanding more complex or unfamiliar ideas, new vocabulary, or abstract verbal concepts. I have experience treating expressive and receptive language disorders from ages 3-21.