Services
Speech Pathology
Now We're Talking- Speech Pathology and Psychology can assist you in the assessment and intervention of the following ranges of practice and from the ages of 2-90+ years.
Click here to learn more about a speech Pathologists role.
Assessments:
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Articulation- The Fisher-Aitken Articulation Survey is an assessment that analyses the clients speech sounds in all positions in a word, and informs us of errors that are not typical for the clients age.
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Oromotor assessment- This assessment analyses the cranial nerves that innervate the head and neck and looks for any abnormalities in range of movement, speed and strength.
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Phonological awareness assessments- The Sutherland Phonological Awareness Test -Revised (SPAT-R) is an individual diagnostic test of phonological and phonemic awareness (syllable awareness, rhyming, phoneme identification, and phoneme manipulation), with Australian norms covering the first to fourth year of schooling. The SPAT-R can also be used diagnostically for older children.
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Language Disorders- The Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals (CELF-5) assessment is used to asses clients with language difficulties and helps us gain a holistic understanding of the clients receptive and expressive language skills. This assessment can be used to assist in a diagnosis of Autism Spectrum disorder as it also has a comprehensive pragmatics profile. This is for children aged 3- 21 years of age.
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Language Delays-The Rossetti Infant-Toddler Language Scale is a criterion referenced instrument that assesses Interaction-Attachment, Pragmatics, Gesture, Play, Language Comprehension, and Language Expression for children aged 0-3 years.
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Literacy- We have multiple reading and writing assessments that assess the clients skills in both areas and compares to norms of the same age. This would most likely be accompanied by a phonological awareness assessment.
Assessments can range from 30 minutes to 120 minutes depending on the areas of concern.
Assessments sessions can be broken into as many sessions as required.
Intervention:
Apraxia of Speech
Apraxia is a rare type of speech disorder that makes it difficult to move the mouth in the way needed to produce sounds and words. A speech pathologist can often provide therapy that can help a person's speech to improve. Apraxia occurs when the brain can't move the mouth, lips, jaw and tongue properly.
Autism Spectrum Disorder
At Now We're Talking Speech Pathology and Psychology, we pride ourselves on being neurodiversity affirming therapists. We work with individuals to help support them in developing autonomy and confidence in their own unique social-communication style and ability. Social-communication intervention may include:
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Understanding pragmatic and social language
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Problem solving skills
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Learning how to self advocate and advocate for your needs
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Understanding and identifying your own emotions, perspectives and thoughts
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Understanding and identifying others emotions, perspectives and thoughts
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Learning how to navigate the social world in your own unique way
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Learning the skills to help make and maintain friendships and relationships
Autism (ASD) is a type of neurodivergence. Autistic people often have differences in learning, thinking, sensory processing. They may also have differences in speech, language and communication needs. Autism is not a learning disability or a mental health condition, although these can and do frequently occur alongside. Speech pathologists can work with autistic people to help support their communication style, navigate the social world, understand pragmatic language (e.g. inferring skills to help read between the lines), develop perspective taking skills, develop self advocacy skills and help them to understand and identify emotions within themselves and others
Development Language Delay
A language delay is when a child has difficulties understanding and/or using spoken language. These difficulties are unusual for the child’s age.
The difficulties might be with:
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responding to language
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understanding words or sentences
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saying first words or learning words
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putting words together to make sentences
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building vocabulary.
Developmental Language Disorder
Developmental language disorder (DLD) is a diagnosis given to a person who has difficulty talking and/or understanding language. DLD can be a ‘hidden’ difficulty. Sometimes it’s mistaken for a problem with behaviour or attention. It’s a lifelong condition that can have a big impact on friendships, learning at school and finding a job. Speech pathologists work with people with DLD to help support them in improving their language skills (expressive and receptive language) and reduce the impact of their communication difficulties.
Intellectual Disability
Intellectual disability is a lifelong condition that affects a person's intellectual skills and their behaviour in different situations. It can include difficulties in communication, memory, understanding, problem solving, self-care, social and emotional skills and physical skills and intervention would focus on these areas.
Language Disorders
People with language disorder have difficulty expressing themselves and understanding what others are saying. This is unrelated to hearing problems. Language disorder, formerly known as receptive-expressive language disorder, is common in young children. Speech pathologists support those with a language disorder to help support both their spoken language (expressive language) and language understanding (receptive language).
Literacy
Our clinicians work with your child to develop skills in reading, writing, spelling, comprehension, grammar, story recount and editing skills. Our tutoring services work on these literacy skills and also assist with early numeracy including number recognition, addition, subtraction, multiplication and times tables. Check our our School readiness weekly tutoring programs with Now We're Ready.
Neurodiverse population
At Now We're Talking Speech Pathology and Psychology, we pride ourselves on being neurodiversity affirming therapists. We work with individuals to help support them in developing autonomy and confidence in their own unique social-communication style and ability. Social-communication intervention may include:
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Understanding pragmatic and social language
-
Problem solving skills
-
Learning how to self advocate and advocate for your needs
-
Understanding and identifying your own emotions, perspectives and thoughts
-
Understanding and identifying others emotions, perspectives and thoughts
-
Learning how to navigate the social world in your own unique way
-
Learning how to regulate your emotions in a safe and functional way.
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Learning the skills to help make and maintain friendships and relationships
Speech pathologists work with many people across all walks of life, including those who identify as neurodivergent or neurodiverse. The types of neurodivergent populations speech pathologists can work with include; those with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), Autism (ASD), dyslexia, dyspraxia, Downs syndrome, dysgraphia, and pathological demand avoidance disorder (PDA). Intervention might include working on areas of expressive language, receptive language, literacy, social-communication and/or social skills.
Phonological awareness
Phonological awareness is the ability to recognize and manipulate the spoken parts of sentences and words. Examples include being able to identify words that rhyme, recognizing alliteration, segmenting a sentence into words, identifying the syllables in a word, and blending and segmenting onset-rimes.
Public Speaking/ workplace performance
Intervention for public speaking and workplace performance can encompass a wide range of areas including breath control and use in conversation/ presentation; prosody of speech; projection; precise articulation and helping the client understand how to use their prosody to engage with the target audience and accentuate their message for best results.
Social Pragmatic Communication Disorder (SCD)
At Now We're Talking Speech Pathology and Psychology, we pride ourselves on being neurodiversity affirming therapists. We work with individuals to help support them in developing autonomy and confidence in their own unique social-communication style and ability. Social-communication intervention may include:
-
Understanding pragmatic and social language
-
Problem solving skills
-
Learning how to self advocate and advocate for your needs
-
Understanding and identifying your own emotions, perspectives and thoughts
-
Understanding and identifying others emotions, perspectives and thoughts
-
Learning how to navigate the social world in your own unique way
-
Learning how to regulate your emotions in a safe and functional way.
-
Learning the skills to help make and maintain friendships and relationships
Social communication disorder (SCD) is characterised by persistent difficulties with the use of verbal and nonverbal language for social purposes. Primary difficulties may be in social interaction, social understanding, pragmatics, language processing, or any combination of the above. Speech pathologists work with people with social communication disorders to help support their communication style, navigate the social world, understand pragmatic language (e.g. inferring skills to help read between the lines), develop perspective taking skills, develop self advocacy skills and help them to understand and identify emotions within themselves and others.
Specific Learning Disorder
Specific learning disorders are neurodevelopmental disorders that are typically diagnosed in early school-aged children, although may not be recognized until adulthood. They are characterised by a persistent impairment in at least one of three major areas: reading, written expression, and/or math. An estimated 80% of those with learning disorders have an impairment in reading in particular (commonly referred to as dyslexia). There is a high comorbidity of specific learning disorder with other neurodevelopment disorders (such as ADHD) as well as anxiety.
Specific skills that may be affected include word reading accuracy, spelling, grammar, or calculation. In addition, fluency in reading and mathematics may be noted. Difficulties with these skills often cause problems in learning subjects such as history, math, science and social studies and may impact everyday activities and social interactions.
Stuttering
Stuttering is a speech disorder characterized by repetition of sounds, syllables, or words; prolongation of sounds; and interruptions in speech known as blocks. An individual who stutters knows what he or she would like to say but has trouble producing a normal flow of speech. Stuttering can also be referred to as a disfluency. People who stutter may have more disfluencies and different types of disfluencies. They may repeat parts of words (repetitions), stretch a sound out for a long time (prolongations), or have a hard time getting a word out (blocks). Stuttering is more than just disfluencies. Stuttering also may include tension and negative feelings about talking. It may get in the way of how you talk to others. You may want to hide your stuttering. So, you may avoid certain words or situations. Stuttering can change from day to day and has been known to come and go in mostly cycles for some. You may have times when you are fluent and times when you stutter more. Stress, fatigue or excitement can increase a persons stutter.
Stroke Rehabilitation/ Head and Neck Cancer
Speech Pathology to assist with stroke rehabilitation or post surgery, can assist with any of the above mentioned difficulties (Speech sounds, receptive and expressive language, social skills, work performance etc), and it really depends on the area of trauma to the brain and the outcomes of this acquired injury.
Other:
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Reports- Our clinicians are able to put together assessment reports, recommendations, NDIS applications and ECEI funding reports for you/ your family.
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Programs- See our programs tab for the multiple programs we run in addition to our services here at Now We're Talking.
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Referrals- Our Clinicians are able to put together a referral for you to see an Audiologist, ENT specialist or other specialist depending on the clients needs.