Health and Wellness

Speech/Language Development-Speech vs Language

Filed under: Health and Wellness

Sue Rector, MA CCC-SLPSpeech vs Language

What’s the diff???

Before I went into the Home Staging business, I was a speech/language pathologist.  I love doing home staging for my clients, but I continue to have a soft spot in my heart for the area of speech/language pathology. I spent 23 years involved in providing speech and language therapy services to children within the public school setting.  I think there is alot of valuable information about speech and language development that can be provided to parents and teachers of children with concerns in this area.  That will be the purpose of my periodic blogs in our Health and Wellness Category. .. hoping to provide others with information and resources in another area which I feel I have knowledge and experience.  

I wanted to write today about a particular “pet peeve” that I have had through the years.  As a speech/language pathologist working in the school environment, I would work with children who had “speech” concerns and children with “language” concerns.  Sometimes my kiddoes would have both. 

I came to realize that many of my regular education colleagues, as well as the parents of my therapy children did not always realize or understand that there is a significant difference between “Speech concerns” vs “Language concerns”.  I did my best to educate and inform them through conversations and newsletters.  But then there were those continued occasions when I would hear one of my regular education teachers say, “Johnny, it is time to go to ’speech class’”, when in fact Johnny was coming to my therapy for “language help”, not speech. Read the rest of this entry »