Clinical Speech-Language Services at Northeastern

Aphasia is a communication disorder that results from neurological damage to the language areas of the brain (typically in the left hemisphere). Aphasia may cause difficulties in speaking, listening, reading, and writing.

Services for individuals with aphasia focus on activities to improve specific language skills and develop strategies to improve overall communication in a variety of situations. The NUSLHC offers individual sessions, as well as group therapy services for individuals with aphasia who wish to work with and learn from others with similar language difficulties.

Apraxia of speech is a disorder of motor speech planning. Those with apraxia do not have any muscle weakness or paralysis, but they have trouble speaking because of a communication breakdown between the brain and the muscles of the lips, jaw, tongue, etc. needed to produce speech.

Speech intervention for apraxia is frequent and intense, and involves working to improve the planning, sequencing, and coordination of muscle movements for speech production with multi-sensory feedback.

Aural Rehabilitation (AR) is for individuals with hearing loss, including those who wear hearing aids and/or have cochlear implants.

AR services include helping individuals adjust to hearing loss, learn communication strategies to manage conversations, learn speechreading skills, practice self-advocacy skills, get support from others, and maximize and explore the use of assistive listening devices.

When an individual has a Central Auditory Processing Disorder (APD), the central nervous system has difficulty processing information that is heard. This can affect how the brain processes spoken language, and can cause difficulty processing verbal instructions or even filtering out background noise.

APD services include training individuals to improve auditory recognition, helping to strengthen language, memory, and attention to compensate for difficulties with auditory processing, and making environmental modifications to enhance the individual’s listening environment.

A cognitive-linguistic disorder is defined as difficulty with any aspect of communication that is affected by disruption of attention, memory, organization, problem solving/reasoning, or executive functions. Deficits in these areas can affect speaking, listening, reading, writing, and social skills, as well as an individual’s daily functioning.

Treatment for people with cognitive-linguistic disorders can include training or re-training cognitive processes, teaching specific functional skills, developing compensatory strategies and support systems, and providing caregiver training.

Dysarthria is a motor speech disorder that results from impaired movement of the muscles used for speech production (lips, tongue, vocal folds, and/or diaphragm). Dysarthria is caused by damage to the brain, which may occur at birth or later in life due to one of many different conditions that involve the nervous system.

Services for dysarthria include slowing the rate of speech, improving breath support for production of louder speech, strengthening muscles and increasing tongue and lip movement to improve speech production, and in severe cases, possibly teaching the individual to use alternative means of communication (AAC devices).

Expressive language refers to an individual’s production (output/talking) of language and receptive language refers to an individual’s understanding (input/listening) of other’s language. Deficits in these areas may indicate a language delay or disorder. Individuals with a language delay/disorder may have difficulty with a variety of language tasks such as following directions, answering questions, naming objects, or putting words together into sentences.

Interventions include teaching and practicing language skills to increase an individual’s understanding of and production of language.

Literacy disorders can include difficulties in any of the following areas: phonological awareness, phonological processing, decoding, word reading/recognition, listening and reading comprehension. These difficulties can present as dyslexia, comprehension disorders, and mixed and non-specified reading disorders.

Interventions for literacy disorders include providing individuals with the necessary strategies to acquire skills for decoding and encoding of written text, as well as comprehension and formulation of language in a variety of contexts.

People with pragmatic language and social communication disorders may have difficulty using language in various social situations, particularly in knowing what to say, how to say it, when to say it, and generally how to “act” around other people.

Services for pragmatic language disorders focus on explicit teaching of these skills for use in social situations that the individual encounters every day, in addition to practicing these skills in functional situations to ensure carry-over.

A speech sound disorder/delay occurs when the speech sound mistakes that children make as they are learning new words continue past an appropriate age. Speech sound disorders include problems with articulation (producing certain sounds) and phonological patterns (speech sound patterns).

Services for speech sound disorders and delays involve models of how to produce the sound correctly, teaching to recognize the difference between correct and incorrect sounds, practicing sounds in different contexts, and teaching the rules and sound patterns of speech to support correct productions.

Stuttering affects the fluency (smoothness/flow) of speech. It begins during childhood and sometimes lasts throughout life. The disorder is characterized by disruptions in production of speech sounds, also called “dysfluencies.” Dysfluencies can have a negative impact on a person’s communication with others if the frequency of occurrence is great, or the nature of dysfluency is severe.

Services for people who stutter include teaching and practicing a range of specific strategies to improve fluency during oral communication.

ACT involves direct instruction and models for articulation (the way sounds are produced) and prosody (the melody of speech) in Mainstream American English (MAE). It provides opportunities to practice learned skills in a variety of communication settings and situations (e.g., presentations, interviews, ordering food), as well as direct feedback on performance from the instructors.

Learn more about ACT