Specialty Clinics
AAC Story Time
This group program helps preschool children who have expressive communication needs. Using low- and high-tech augmentative communication strategies, treatment fosters development of early literacy skills, language comprehension, speech and expressive language, and social skills. Activities support each child’s individual goals and promote active involvement.
Aural Habilitation Clinic (Pediatric)
This clinic is designed for children ages 0-6 identified with sensorineural hearing loss who may wear hearing aid amplification and/or have cochlear implants. It focuses on increasing attention as a listener, learning to understand words in play-based routines, and developing spoken language skills through:
- Auditory-oral or sign-supported speech options;
- Parent Coaching: How to Promote Language Learning with Your Young Child;
- Vocabulary development and peer socialization;
- Developing sign proficiency in CASE or ASL for infants and toddlers; and
- School staff consultations for setting and realizing short-term objectives.
This clinic offers a telehealth option via Skype for parents, health care providers or educators who live at a distance and would like to collaborate on behalf of a child with hearing loss.
Disfluency and Stuttering Clinic
This clinic offers individualized services across the age span.
- For preschool children and their families, services focus on environmental and personal strategies for facilitating fluency and successful communication.
- For young school-age children, services aim to improve fluency and shape positive attitudes toward communication.
- For older children and adults, services address fluency training, desensitization to stuttering, modifying stuttering, and attitudes toward communication.
Lee Silverman Voice Treatment (LSVT®)
Less Silverman Voice Treatment (LSVT®) is an evidenced-based treatment program that uses increased vocal effort to improve the vocal loudness and voice quality in people with Parkinson Disease.
An LSVT® certified clinician evaluates and treats all program participants. LSVT® is administered on an intensive schedule of 16 individual sessions in one month. Therapy focuses on vocal loudness, effort, and carryover to everyday conversation.
Parent Coaching: How to Promote Language Learning With Your Young Child
Led by a certified provider of the Hanen Program’s It Takes Two To Talk© curriculum, this clinic promotes parents more successful and sustained communication turn-taking with their child. Parents learn to build their child’s language skills naturally during everyday routines and activities. It consists of an eight-week series of group classes for families, with the option to supplement with concurrent or subsequent individualized parent-child coaching sessions.
The Phonology Clinic
This clinic provides individualized speech services for children who have delays in developing speech sounds and/or who have speech intelligibility issues. Parents also receive guidance to help facilitate improvements in the intelligibility of their child’s speech.
The Phonology Clinic is one of the specialty clinics in the Communication Processes Unit at the Waisman Center, and is a satellite clinic of the UW Department of Communicative Disorders.
Preschool Express
This group language development program is designed for preschool children at risk for language delay, including late talkers, children with a specific language impairment (SLI), or deaf/hard of hearing children. Interactions with supportive adults and peers are designed to increase turn taking, improve vocabulary, increase attention to task and topic, increase frequency of talking, and improve question comprehension.
Supported Conversation in Aphasia Group
This group focuses on developing connections through communication. Individuals draw upon personal experiences and interests and connect with others through functional communication. To promote successful, meaningful communication, we support participants as they use whatever means to exchange and share ideas. In addition to speech, we encourage clients to use gestures, drawing, writing, facial expressions, and body language.
Telling Life Stories
In this clinic, designed for people with aphasia, participants create life story projects that include drawings, photos, writing, personal artifacts, and audio/video clips. These projects enable participants to express their personalities and experiences before and after acquiring aphasia.
Transgender Voice & Communication
Male to Female (MtF) and Female to Male (FtM) clients are seen for a comprehensive assessment of voice, speech, language and social communication skills in the context of gender. Treatment programs are individualized for clients influenced by the phase of transition as well as their personal communication goals. Therapy focus may include vocal health, good vocal technique, vocal quality, pitch and intonation, loudness, articulation, use of language and social communication skills.