Can Speech Therapy Help Kids w/ Autism? | Autism Video Lecture | Understanding and Treating Autism - Health & Fitness

there's a child with an autism spectrum
disorder benefit from speech therapy
well most children have some speech or
language issue because that is one of
the core symptoms that is described in
the diagnostic criteria for having
autism and the kind of speech therapy
will vary depending on whether it's just
a simple speech and language delay or
difficulty with actual pronunciation or
what they call verbal apraxia and kids
need some particular kind of auto motor
or prompting or verbal therapy as well
as just speech therapy and speech
therapy is important both at an
individual level because you need
individual speech and language therapy
for the child to develop direct skills
in communication learning language
sentence construction vocabulary etc etc
but you also need speech therapy in a
group setting because you need language
to communicate so speech therapy should
be provided individually but also in a
group setting because picking up on the
back and forth of conversation to be
able to introduce yourself and be not
able to interrupt to ask questions this
whole social piece of group speech
therapy is very important and I think it
definitely has a place for children with
autism all children who get the
diagnosis of autism do get a speech and
language evaluation even for children
with Asperger's who don't have a classic
speech delay but have difficulty with
pragmatics which means using language to
communicate will benefit from speech
therapy but a particular kind of speech
therapy and that is to help them with
communication and verbal pragmatics
group therapy in using speech is very
important and people are actually using
all kinds of modalities whether they're
using puppets and play therapy to engage
with also developing speech and language
speech therapy can be done in a
structured form in school also provided
privately
and we are doing speech therapy all the
time as we engage with our children so
engage with them develop eye contact
make them verbalize versus just pointing
and use every opportunity for them to
learn to use language and to communicate
because it's important for them to be
able to communicate their needs and use
language for that purpose and also to be
able to respond back to you so
maintaining eye contact using language
not just verbal but even nonverbal and I
think that needs to be included in with
speech therapy