Speech therapists or Speech Language Pathologists (SLPs) work to diagnose, prevent, and assess problems related to language, speech, social communication and swallowing disorders in children and adults.

You will need to take your child to a speech therapist when:
1. Your child is having difficulty uttering certain words.
2. You child has weak muscles around the mouth.
3. Your child has as a breathing disorder.
4. Your child has a swallowing disorder.
5. Your child's vocals are hoarse, slurred, non-fluent.
6. Your child has hearing difficulty.

A speech therapist with training on how to be an audiologist can treat hearing loss. This is because often children with difficult in speech have accompanying hearing loss and vice versa.

Yes. A speech therapist can help manage autistic children as he/she works to improve the child's verbal, non-verbal, and social communication.

A speech therapist has specific treatment procedures for all speech and hearing related impairments. For instance, for a child with language disorder, a speech therapist will:
1. Help with any articulation problems the child is facing.
2. Help with fluency problems such as stuttering.
3. Help with problems such as voice quality, pitch, and volume.