Speech-Language Therapy

Speech-language therapy, delivered by the discipline of speech-language pathology, is the evaluation and treatment of communication and swallowing disorders across the lifespan, including expressive and receptive language disorders, voice disorders, speech sound disorders, stuttering, and dysphagia. The profession in the United States traces a key founding moment to 1925, with the establishment of the American Academy of Speech Correction, an organization that would later become the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association in 1978, though informal groups of speech correctionists had already begun forming in the early twentieth century. Therapy typically involves structured exercises and strategies tailored to a patient's specific communication or swallowing impairment.