QUEENS ORAL MOTOR SPEECH THERAPY & SPEECH-LANGUAGE SUPPORT
QUEENS, ORAL MOTOR SPEECH THERAPY
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Queens oral motor speech therapy and speech-language support helps children develop the speech movements, communication skills, and language foundations needed for clearer communication and school readiness.
We provide in-home oral motor speech therapy throughout Queens, with remote options available when appropriate. Licensed speech-language pathologists work directly with families in Queens homes, including Forest Hills, Bayside, Fresh Meadows, Kew Gardens, Douglaston, and surrounding neighborhoods.
Support may be appropriate when a child shows early difficulty coordinating speech movements, when a family wants to begin proactively, or when a child is ready to strengthen communication skills beyond current expectations. Sessions may address speech clarity, articulation, language development, communication, and school-readiness skills according to each child’s individual profile.
Many Queens families begin support early rather than waiting. Families also seek in-home support to maintain strong progress and strengthen communication as classroom and academic expectations increase.
Queens Letters focuses on speech language, literacy, and math intervention that is proactive, early, and enrichment oriented academic and speech language support.
WE TRAVEL TO YOU THROUGHOUT QUEENS:
Astoria, Auburndale, Bayside, Bayswater, Beechhurst, Belle Harbor, Bellerose, Breezy Point, Briarwood, Cambria Heights, College Point, Corona, Douglaston, East Elmhurst, Edgemere, Elmhurst, Far Rockaway, Floral Park, Flushing, Forest Hills, Forest Park, Fresh Meadows, Glendale, Hamilton Beach, Hillcrest, Hollis, Hollis Hills, Holliswood, Howard Beach, Hunters Point, Jackson Heights, Jamaica, Jamaica Estates, Jamaica Hills, Kew Gardens, Kew Gardens Hills, Laurelton, Lefrak City, Lindenwood, Little Neck, Long Island City, Malba, Maspeth, Meadowmere, Middle Village, Neponsit, North Corona, Oakland Gardens, Ozone Park, Pomonok, Queens Village, Rego Park, Richmond Hill, Ridgewood, Rockaway Park, Rosedale, Roxbury, South Jamaica, South Ozone Park, Springfield Gardens, Steinway, Sunnyside, Utopia, Whitestone, Willets Point, Woodhaven, Woodside.
Speech-Language Pathologists and Clinicians We Work With
Services are provided in-home and remotely. Some of the speech-language pathologists we work with are trained in the Orton Gillingham approach. Many of the speech-language pathologists we work with are trained in literacy and offer support with decoding, spelling and reading fluency services. The speech-language pathologists and clinicians we work with work with babies, toddlers, school-age students, and adults with expertise in:
We also support families pursuing homeschooling for K–5 students, offering personalized in-home or remote instruction tailored to each child’s learning style and needs.
What This Service Is
Queens oral motor speech therapy supports speech movements and communication skills when oral-motor coordination affects clear, efficient speech.
Oral motor and motor-speech support may focus on coordination of the lips, tongue, jaw, breath, and other movements involved in speech production. A licensed speech-language pathologist determines appropriate goals based on the child’s communication profile.
Queens Letters delivers in-home support so strategies can connect naturally with communication routines, family interaction, and school-readiness goals.
When Families Seek This Support
Queens families seek speech-language support for early concerns, proactive development, and continued communication growth.
Families may begin exploring support when speech is difficult to understand, certain sounds remain challenging, oral movements appear difficult to coordinate, or teachers and parents notice communication affecting classroom participation.
Other families start before concerns become significant. Proactive support helps prevent gaps from developing and can strengthen communication foundations as preschool or elementary expectations increase.
Advanced learners may also benefit when families want stronger articulation, expressive language, narrative skills, vocabulary, or communication skills for increasingly demanding classroom environments.
How It Works
In-home speech-language support allows instruction to connect communication goals with a child’s everyday environment and routines.
A speech-language pathologist considers the child’s current skills and determines which speech, oral-motor, language, or communication goals are appropriate. Sessions are delivered in the home when available, allowing specialists to work directly with children and families in familiar surroundings.
For younger children, activities may connect speech and language development with play, books, conversation, and everyday routines. For elementary-age children, support may increasingly connect communication with classroom participation, literacy, and school learning.
When Children Benefit
Children may benefit from support at the first sign of difficulty, during proactive development, or when ready for more advanced communication goals.
Families commonly consider support in three situations:
- Early concerns: speech is difficult to understand, sounds are challenging, or communication is not progressing as expected.
- Proactive support: families want to start early, strengthen foundations, and reduce the likelihood of future communication or learning gaps.
- Enrichment: children are progressing well but are ready to strengthen vocabulary, expressive language, storytelling, speech clarity, or classroom communication.
Many Queens families begin support early rather than waiting for difficulties to become more pronounced.
Speech-Language Pathologists and Clinicians We Work With
Services are provided in-home and remotely. Some of the speech-language pathologists we work with are trained in the Orton Gillingham approach. Many of the speech-language pathologists we work with are trained in literacy and offer support with decoding, spelling and reading fluency services. The speech-language pathologists and clinicians we work with work with babies, toddlers, school-age students, and adults with expertise in:
- Pronunciation
- Enunciation
- Articulation
- Expressive Language Disorder
- Writing & Speaking Therapy
- Comprehension- Listening & Reading
- Listening Comprehension
- Auditory Processing
- Vocabulary
- Teens – Language Therapy
- Stuttering
- Feeding
- Oral Motor
- Voice
- AAC
- Adult Speech Therapy
- Public Speaking
- Accent Reduction Modification Speech Therapy
We also support families pursuing homeschooling for K–5 students, offering personalized in-home or remote instruction tailored to each child’s learning style and needs.
Training/Certifications
Training/Certifications
This is a controversial topic among speech therapists but not among speech researchers! Oral motor speech therapy is divided into speech oral motor therapy, which is researched-backed, and non-speech oral motor therapy—pure nonsense. Let’s start with the term oral motor, which is an ambiguous term to begin with. Speech sound disorders (articulation and phonological disorders) is the up-to-date nomenclature.
Speech therapists who incorporate non-speech oral motor techniques, learn about them at professional trainings, post-graduation, when trends are prioritized over science. The content of these professional trainings are not endorsed by the American Speech Hearing Association (ASHA). The majority (85% according to Dr. Gregg Lof’s research) of speech therapists utilize ineffective protocols when diagnosing or treating “oral motor” speech problems—pretty scary! Unfortunately, there is a lack of quality post-graduate support in our field.
Many children have been misdiagnosed and, as a result, receive ineffective speech treatment. In essence, when working on speech sounds (speech oral-motor), effective therapy always includes the production or shaping of a sound (close your lips and say “mmm” to teach /m/ or if the child is omitting a final “p” in words, a clinician helps the child say final “p” in short words, e.g. “hop”, “top”, “mop”, etc.). Working on sounds during speech therapy is natural and a no-brainer because it includes facilitating motor planning (agility), mouth strength, and linguistics. All of these underlying neurological processes need to be activated at once—that’s how we speak!
Non-speech oral motor exercises are purported to strengthen muscles and improve muscle tone, including blowing whistles, sucking straws, and chewing on chewy tubes. It does not involve working on actual sounds. It may improve general oral mouth muscle or tone, but there is NO scientific evidence that it actually improves speech. Yep, none! Our mouths are used for a variety of functions (breathing, drinking, chewing, swallowing, etc.), and the more you know about the science of speech therapy, the more this makes sense.
Speech is special! We actually use minimal muscle strength to talk. Tone is important when the speech muscles are at rest. Strength is important for chewing, not talking. Speech-learning is primarily based on agility (motor planning, think of a ventriloquist), cognition, and linguistics—all brain-based! Other animals vocalize but can’t talk; the differences reside in our brains, not our mouths! That’s the beauty of evolution.
If your child is having trouble controlling her mouth muscles to talk and eat and cannot master chewing, blowing, or making specific sounds, he or she may have an oral motor disorder.
An analogy, for example, would be to perform finger strength exercises to become a better piano player. Strong fingers and lack of actual piano practice is the equivalent of non-speech oral motor therapy. Would you hire a piano teacher to work only on strengthening your child’s finger muscles? Non-speech oral motor techniques have nothing to do with speaking, e.g. chewing on chewy tubes, moving your articulators in ways in which we don’t speak, drinking from special straws, etc. Speech scientists strongly advise that speech therapists focus on techniques that facilitate shaping and/or producing sounds for a given language.
To quote an excerpt from a Letter to the Editor, from the NY Times (1/24/12), the following sums up what happens in the therapy world, no matter what profession:
“We frequently receive manuscripts in which people promote ideas and theories without adequate data, usually in pursuit of personal fame or monetary gain. Although the peer-reviewed medical literature is not without flaws, there is no better way than peer review to vet information before it is used in the diagnosis and treatment of disease. At least in medicine, we should think carefully before we decide that more, unfiltered information is better information.”
-Jeffrey M. Drazen, M.D.
- Does Oral-Motor Therapy Really Work by Isaa Marrs (SpeechLanguageFeeding.com: The Resource for Parents and Professionals)
- Oral Motor Therapy by Dr. Caroline Bowen
- Logic, Theory and Evidence Against the Use of Non-Speech Oral Motor Exercises to Change Speech Sound Production (An Interview with Gregory L. Lof, Ph.D., CCC SLP) – (The Childhood Apraxia of Speech Association of North America – CASANA)
- The Application of Evidence-Based Practice to Nonspeech Oral Motor Treatments – (American Speech-Language-Hearing Association)
- Steps to Identify Pediatric Muscle Weakness and Signs of Neuromuscular Disease (ChildMuscleWeakness.org)
- Recommendations for the use of pacifiers
- Is Tongue Strength an Important Influence on Rate of Articulation in Diadochokinetic and Reading Tasks (Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research)
- A Review of Standardized Tests of Nonverbal Oral and Speech Motor Performance (HighBeam Research)
- A Meme’s View of Non-Speech Oral Motor Exercises
- Controversial Practices – Oral Motor Therapies – readings, abstracts, references
- Clinical Decision Making and Oral Motor Treatments
- Isolating muscle during speech therapy- it doesn’t really work.
- Differential Diagnosis of Severe Speech Impairment in Young Children
- Apraxia Kids About Nonspeech Oral Motor
- The Use of Nonspeech Oral Motor Exercises in the Treatment of Children with Cleft Palate: A Re-Examination of Available Evidence
- Ankyloglossia Tongue Tie: To Clip or Not to Clip? That’s the Question.
- Pitt Neuroscientists Find Multiple Brain Regions Control Speech, Challenging Common Assumption
- Do Oral Motor Exercises Work for Swallowing Disorders?
FAQ
Queens oral motor speech therapy is individualized according to each child’s speech, communication, developmental, and school-readiness needs.
What is oral motor speech therapy?
Oral motor speech therapy may address coordination of the lips, tongue, jaw, breath, and other movements involved in producing speech. A speech-language pathologist determines whether oral-motor or motor-speech work is appropriate for an individual child.
When should a Queens family consider speech-language support?
Families may seek support when speech is difficult to understand, communication is not progressing as expected, or a child needs stronger skills for classroom participation. Families may also begin proactively before significant gaps develop.
Is oral motor speech therapy available in-home in Queens?
Yes. Queens Letters provides in-home support throughout Queens, with remote options available when appropriate and subject to specialist availability.
Can children who are already doing well receive support?
Yes. Support can also focus on enrichment, including stronger articulation, vocabulary, expressive language, storytelling, and communication skills that support increasingly advanced learning.
Which Queens neighborhoods receive in-home services?
In-home services are available across Queens based on specialist availability, including Forest Hills, Rego Park, Kew Gardens, Fresh Meadows, Bayside, Douglaston, Little Neck, and Jamaica Estates.
This work is designed for families seeking proactive and enrichment-oriented support, not only for children with clear developmental delays.
Check out our rates here!Check out our rates here!
MEET QUEENS LETTERS SPEECH LANGUAGE THERAPISTS AND PATHOLOGISTS WHO TRAVEL TO YOUR HOME
Karen
M.S., CCC-SLP, TSSLD
Sholom
MA, CCC-SLP, TSSLD, SPEECH LANGUAGE PATHOLOGIST
Liza B.
M.S., CCC-SLP, TSSLD, SPEECH LANGUAGE PATHOLOGIST
Max
Ph.D., CCC-SLP, TSSLD
Kathleen E.
SPEECH-LANGUAGE PATHOLOGIST
Alexandra C.
M.S., CCC-SLP, SPEECH LANGUAGE PATHOLOGIST
Rachel
M.S., CCC-SLP, TSSLD, QOM
FREE CONSULTATION!!!
Call & Text: (917) 426-8880
Email: queens@brooklynletters.com
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