| The speech pathologist is primarily concerned with a child’s communication. They are concerned with establishing how a child understands language, whether he or she can understand verbal instructions or whether he or she needs clues from his or her environment to understand what is going on around them. The speech pathologist will give the child some means of communication with the outside world within what he has already accomplished in his communicative abilities. This might be through activities that encourage speech, signing, electronic aids or even a picture board.
Speech pathologists frequently help the child and his or her family to establish normal feeding patterns, as there is much research that suggests a correlation between good feeding patterns and the eventual possibility of developing normal speech.
Even if a child with cerebral palsy is able to speak well, a speech pathologist can assist them by helping to make speech clearer and easier to understand, or on building their language skills by expanding their vocabulary, learning to speak in sentences, or improving their listening skills.
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