Phonological awareness is a child’s ability to hear, identify, and manipulate the sounds inside spoken words, and it is one of the strongest early predictors of how easily that child will learn to read. It is a listening skill, not a letter skill, and it develops before a child recognizes a single letter of the […]
Pragmatic language is the set of skills a child uses to communicate socially: starting and ending conversations, taking turns, staying on topic, reading tone and body language, and adjusting how they speak depending on who they are talking to. A child can have crystal-clear speech sounds and an impressive vocabulary and still find these skills
Selective mutism is an anxiety-based condition in which a child who speaks comfortably in familiar settings, such as at home, is consistently unable to speak in certain other situations, such as school, despite having the language ability to do so. It is not stubbornness, defiance, or simple shyness. It is a child who genuinely cannot
Selective Mutism: When a Child Talks at Home but Not at School Read More »
Private speech therapy and school-based speech services both help children communicate, but they answer different questions: school services address whether a communication difficulty affects a child’s access to their education, while private therapy addresses the child’s overall communication development regardless of school impact. Understanding that distinction is the key to deciding what your child actually
Private Speech Therapy vs. School-Based Services: What Vero Beach Parents Should Know Read More »
Chronic ear infections can contribute to speech and language delay because the fluid and inflammation they cause temporarily reduce a child’s hearing, and children learn to talk by hearing the sounds of language clearly and consistently. When hearing comes and goes during the years a child is building speech, the foundation for those skills can
Receptive language is a child’s ability to understand what is said to them, and expressive language is their ability to put thoughts into words. They are two distinct skills, and a child can be strong in one and delayed in the other. Understanding which is which is the first step toward knowing whether to watch,
Receptive vs Expressive Language: How to Tell the Difference and When to Seek Help Read More »
Kindergarten speech and language readiness means a child can be understood by unfamiliar adults, follow multi-step spoken directions, use complete sentences to explain and ask, and hear the sounds inside words well enough to begin learning to read. Those four abilities carry more of the kindergarten day than most parents realize, because nearly everything in
Screen time affects speech development primarily by displacing the back-and-forth conversation that young children need to learn language, and research links higher-than-recommended screen use in the earliest years to measurable delays in communication. This is one of the most common questions I hear from parents, and the honest answer is that screens are not automatically
Screen Time and Speech Development: What Parents Should Know Read More »
A late talker is a toddler between about 18 and 30 months who understands language and develops normally in every other way, but has a noticeably small spoken vocabulary for their age. The reassuring part is that being a late talker is common, and many late talkers catch up on their own. The harder part
Is Your Toddler A Late Talker? When You Should Be Concerned Read More »
Speech sound development follows a predictable order, with easier sounds appearing first and trickier ones like R, S, and TH mastered later, and research shows that most English-speaking children produce the majority of sounds correctly by about age five and nearly all sounds by age seven. Knowing that order is what lets parents tell the
Speech Sound Development by Age: When Should Your Child Master Each Sound? Read More »