Online Speech Therapy for Autism Spectrum Disorder
In this article, we will review:
1) How Does Autism Spectrum Disorder Affect Communication?
2) Does Speech Therapy Work for Children with Autism?
3) How Does Online Autism Therapy at Home Work?
4) 7 SLP Recommended Family Activities for Children with Autism
5) Connected Speech Pathology - Online Speech Therapy Services
If you have questions or want to learn more, we will provide you with a free phone consultation.
How Does Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) Affect Communication?
People with autism may face various communication challenges that hinder building relationships and making friends.
A research study showed that young adults with autism spectrum disorder were significantly more likely not to see friends, be excluded from activities, and be socially isolated. A lack of social bonding with peers can lead to long-term physical and mental health issues.
People with autism can have difficulty building bonds and friendships because of the following social communication challenges:
Language and Interpersonal Communication
Interpersonal communication involves making eye contact, turn-taking during a conversation, staying on topic, understanding, and using spoken language meaningfully. It can also involve emotional and self-regulation while interacting with others, understanding other’s points of view, and interpreting non-verbal cues like facial expressions, gestures, and body language.
Flexible Thinking
Flexible thinking involves shifting thoughts or plans to adapt to the surrounding environment.
Abstract Concepts and Shades of Gray
Abstract concepts are things that cannot be seen, heard, or felt, such as words like “happy,” “colorful,” or “amazing.” Shades of gray are when the meaning of a word or phrase is unclear, leading to difficulty understanding jokes and figurative language.
Collaborative Skills
Collaborative skills are when someone works successfully toward a common goal with others in a group. Examples of collaborative skills include:
Listening to others and following agreed-upon rules for discussions.
Building on another’s ideas.
Continuing a conversation through multiple exchanges.
Understanding Feelings
Understanding feelings and another’s perspective is a crucial communication skill. Acknowledging differences in points of view during a conversation and responding appropriately to that information benefits both the speaker and the listener.
Regulating Emotions
Regulating emotions allows one to maintain composure when stressed, anxious, annoyed, or frustrated. Poor emotional regulation may lead to overreacting, heightened negative emotions, and emotional outbursts.
Making Inferences
Making inferences is essential for social pragmatics. It is a very complex skill that requires reading a situation and deciphering the clues.
Does Speech Therapy Work for Children with Autism?
A speech-language pathologist (SLP) can teach the social skills needed to help autistic children succeed emotionally and socially. A speech therapist will allow the person to connect to the new social skill they have learned and apply it to many situations and areas in their life.
In addition to addressing social communication abilities, speech-language pathologists can help autistic individuals improve speech pronunciation, speaking, and understanding.
Children with autism will have an easier time forming meaningful relationships after working with a speech therapist on their speech, language, and communication skills.
What Happens if the Autistic Person Doesn’t Always Have the Words?
A speech therapist can also help identify the most appropriate means of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) for those who cannot always rely on their speech to communicate. It can also include using communication boards with symbols such as printed words and pictures or computers with symbols that generate speech using a recorded or digitized voice. A speech therapist can also help children to use gestures to communicate.
The role of a speech-language pathologist is to understand how to match each of these approaches to the individual’s communication needs.
How Does Online Autism Therapy at Home Work?
Some people might assume that in-person speech therapy is the best way to deliver speech therapy to autistic adults and children. While in-person autism therapy has benefits, transferring skills learned in therapy to the everyday world can be challenging.
Engaging in online speech therapy for autism from home allows the speech therapist to work closely with the individual and their family to develop meaningful goals within the home’s natural environment. Also, family involvement in therapy benefits autistic individuals greatly because the family can reinforce strategies learned in treatment around the clock.
Speech therapy sessions are held on Zoom right from the family’s home with the family present. Virtual evaluations help SLPs understand each person’s specific communication needs by observing the environment, making suggestions, and developing functional goals for everyday life.
The assessment will focus on social communication and expressive and receptive language. While the evaluation may include some standardized measures, it will also consist of interviews with parents/caregivers and observation.
For younger children with autism, the SLP can accomplish most therapy activities during play activities.
7 SLP Recommended Family Activities for Children with Autism
1. Feeling Faces
This is a great game to target social skills and help your child learn about emotions and feelings. Print out some faces, cut them up, and ask your child questions like “what does he feel?” or “is she happy or sad?”. This can help reinforce the correct facial emotions.
2. Photo Story BINGO
This game can be easily adapted for toddlers and younger children using photos of toys instead of people. Get simple sentences like “I am happy” or “I feel sick.” Place the sentence between two photos, for example, “I feel” and then a photo of the sun and “sick” with a picture of medicine. See if your child can find and match all the images to form sentences or ask them questions like, “do you see something that feels sick?”
3. I Spy
This game can reinforce attention to detail, eye contact, and object recognition while promoting language abilities like prepositions such as “in,” “on,” or “under.” Print a simple picture of an object, cut it up, and hide it around the house. Ask your child to find the object by saying, “I spy something in/on/under (place).” Let them know what placement you use to learn the correct preposition for that item.
4. What’s Missing
This game will reinforce attention to detail and visual scanning skills while promoting problem-solving skills simultaneously. Place many pictures on the floor or wall (mixing different categories is good too, for example, toys, animals, food, etc.) and ask your child to talk about what’s missing in the picture. Ensure you let them know if they are looking at the wrong image.
5. Dressing Up
This game is perfect for promoting turn-taking skills, language development, and creativity. All you have to do is get a box of dress-up items such as hats, masks, sunglasses, etc. Place the box in front of your child and invite them to take turns picking out an item and putting it on. Once they have finished dressing up, they can talk about their costume or act out what they are doing (for example, play cooking if they have a toy kitchen set).
6. Where’s Wally/Waldo?
This game promotes visual searching, turn-taking, and problem-solving skills while promoting language development (especially if you ask them what they see in the picture). The idea of the game is to find Waldo in a crowd of people. Print out some Waldo pictures and hide them around the house. Your child will not only have fun looking for Waldo but also grow in confidence as time goes on. Let your child know what they should look for to identify when they find it correctly.
7. What’s Different?
This game is perfect for language development and refining visual searching skills. Print out different pictures that are either the same or similar and mix them up. Once you have mixed them up, ask your child what’s different about each photograph.
Connected Speech Pathology - Online Speech Therapy Services
At Connected Speech Pathology, our speech-language pathologists can provide speech and language therapy for people with autism. Our speech therapists hold a Certificate of Clinical Competence from the American speech-language-hearing association and have master’s degrees in communication sciences and disorders.
The initial step is to set up a free phone consultation with our lead speech-language pathologist to start with speech therapy.
Speech therapy focuses on:
Discussion of social communication skills, particularly related to ASD.
Interventions that potentially include another person such as a sibling or a loved one who serves as the ‘peer.’
Observation and discussion of video modeling.
Providing strategies for fine-tuning language.
Early intervention will be playful for our preschool-age children and include speech therapy goals relatable to parents and caregivers. Autistic children will not be required to sit in front of the computer for the entire therapy session. A parent may be asked to bring their favorite toys to the session, and we will provide practical suggestions for promoting a child’s language skills and social pragmatics during everyday activities and interactions.
Online speech therapy can be an effective way for autistic children to access a skilled speech-language pathologist who can work with a wide range of unique needs. Intensive, individualized treatment can lessen the risk of social isolation that can result from ASD.
See our blog on Childhood Language and Social Development for more information on this topic.
By providing online speech therapy services in the home, the potential for improvement is exponential. Children need to start speech therapy as early as possible.
About the Author
Allison Geller is a speech-language pathologist (SLP) and the owner of Connected Speech Pathology. She obtained her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from the University of Florida in Speech-Language Pathology. Allison has practiced speech therapy in a number of settings including telepractice, acute care, outpatient rehabilitation, and private practice. She has worked extensively with individuals across the lifespan including toddlers, preschoolers, school-aged children, and adults. She specializes in the evaluation, diagnosis, and treatment of a variety of communication disorders including receptive/expressive language disorders, articulation disorders, voice disorders, fluency disorders, brain injury, and swallowing disorders.
Allison served as the clinical coordinator of research in aphasia in the Neurological Institute at Columbia University Medical Center in New York. She is on the Board of Directors for the Corporate Speech Pathology Network (CORSPAN), a Lee Silverman Voice Treatment (LSVT) certified clinician, and a proud Family Empowerment Scholarship/Step-Up For Students provider. Allison is passionate about delivering high quality-effective treatment remotely because it’s convenient and easy to access. What sets us apart from other online speech therapy options is—Allison takes great care to hire the very best SLPs from all over the country.
Please contact us if you have any questions.
