What is oral-motor / muscle-based therapy?
Oral-motor therapy uses a variety of child friendly exercises to develop awareness, strength, coordination and mobility of the mouth muscles (jaw, lips and tongue). It is often used in conjunction with traditional articulation (speech) therapy where individual sounds are addressed according to the child’s mouth muscle skills. For example, if a child has difficulty with the sounds /p/ and /t/ and can easily bring his/her lips together for /p/ but cannot elevate the tip of the tongue for /t/, we would work on the sound /p/ in words while we strengthened the tongue with oral motor exercises for /t/. Oral-motor intervention can help resolve issues with drooling, thumbsucking and pacifier use.
