Our Speech Therapist offers therapy in both Afrikaans and English. Her main focus areas include, but are not limited to:
- Early childhood intervention
- Speech, language and auditory processing therapy for school-aged children
- Working with children on the autism spectrum and other language and developmental delays
Our Speech Therapist has a special interest in the Developmental Individual-difference Relationship-Based model (DIR®/Floortime™) and is a qualified DIRFloortime® Practitioner. She works on speech disorders (production of sounds), language disorders (problems understanding words or putting them together), auditory and cognitive disorders as well as oral feeding disorders.
Speech disorders
- Fluency includes problems such as stuttering
- Articulation involves difficulty producing clear and distinct sounds
- Voice relates to issues with pitch, volume or voice quality to the extent that it distracts others from understanding what is being said
- Resonance in relation to hypernasality or hyponasality
Expressive and receptive language disorders
- Receptive disorders refer to difficulties understanding or processing language
- Expressive disorders, on the other hand, refer to problems with spoken and written language (difficulties putting words together, vocabulary limitations, incorrect articulation of sounds within words)
Auditory and cognitive disorders
- Auditory disorders in relation to speech, language, communication, and listening skills impacted by hearing loss, deafness and auditory processing.
- Cognitive disorders include difficulty with skills that relate to attention, memory, problem solving and executive functioning (higher brain functioning related to goal-directed activities)
Oral feeding disorders
- Oral feeding disorders such as problems eating, drinking, chewing, swallowing, gagging/choking, coughing, food selectivity/refusal
