When your child is diagnosed with autism, speech and language therapy is often one of the first and best treatments recommended by every doctor. Our pathologist will explain how speech therapy can help a child with autism.
Speech therapy can play a key role in treating autism:
This type of communication impairments is common in children who diagnosed with autism. Speech and language therapy often plays a key role in their Early Intervention treatment. It’s better to refer the children and families by our specialists.
Once autism is diagnosed in children, through speech and language therapy our professionals will make you to find better improvement in communication and to enhance their quality of life. With autism your child has little or no speech, our speech and language therapy team may introduce alternatives to speech, such as signing or the use of technology that supports communication.
How does speech therapy help children who have autism?
The main purpose of speech and language therapy is to help the children to improve their communication. A child with autism is especially important because communication is a key component in their ability to form relationships and function in their world.
Often, speech therapy can help a child with autism to:
1. Develop the ability to express their wants and needs
This might be by using both verbal and non-verbal communication. Kids with autism need to be taught how to exchange ideas with others.
This is not only important within the family, but also when they move outside of the home and want to build relationships with their peers.
2. Understand what is being said to them
Speech and language therapy helps children with autism to understand the verbal and nonverbal communication that other people use. It also helps them to recognize cues like body language and facial expressions.
Speech and language therapy can help an autistic child to understand how to start their communication without prompting from others.
3. Communicate in order to develop friendships and interact with peers
Some children with autism may fight back with the spontaneity and unpredictability of casual conversations. It also has very specific interests and finds it hard to talk about other things.
Speech and language therapy can teach these children strategies for mixing with other kids so that they can make friends, play and experience social success.
4. Learn To Communicate In A Way That Other People Understand
Sometimes autism in children may bring with it unusual language processing and idiosyncratic learning patterns. As a result, children who have autism commonly have problems developing spoken language. Sometimes, they learn spoken language in chunks without breaking what they hear down into individual words and sounds.
They might repeat long ‘chunks’ of favorite stories or TV shows without really understanding what they’re saying or being able to use any of the words in the ‘chunk’ independently. This is called ‘echolalia’ and speech therapy helps children to find ways to overcome it and the other difficulties that children with autism have when talking with others.
5. Articulate words and sentences well
Like many neuro-typical children, kids with autism also struggle with the articulation of sounds and putting words into sentences. Many children with autism also have great difficulty with time concepts, abstract language, and vocabulary that depends on the context for meaning.
Non- literal language like idioms, hints and indirect instructions can also be tricky. These are areas that a speech pathologist can help a child with autism with.
Conclusion:
Autism is usually evident before age 3, and language delays can be recognized as early as 18 months of age. In some cases, autism can be identified as early 10 to 12 months of age. It is very important to start speech and language therapy for autism child’s as early as possible when it can have the greatest impact.