A Guide to Online Speech Therapy for Autism Spectrum Disorder
Communication is a skill that significantly impacts social interactions, relationships, and overall well-being. For autistic individuals, communication challenges can be multifaceted, affecting both verbal communication and nonverbal communication.
In this article, we will explore how Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) affects communication, the benefits of online speech therapy, and practical activities that families can incorporate into their daily routines to support their child's communication development.
Key Takeaways:
People with ASD often face verbal and nonverbal communication challenges, including interpersonal communication, interpreting nonverbal cues, understanding abstract language, regulating emotions, making inferences, flexible thinking, and collaborative skills.
The role of speech-language pathologists in teaching social skills and improving speech, language, and communication abilities.
How online speech therapy provides flexible, accessible, and effective interventions within the home environment, involving family members in the therapeutic process.
Family participation significantly impacts reinforcing strategies learned in speech therapy, promoting continuous support for the autistic individual.
How Does Autism Spectrum Disorder Affect Communication?
Does Speech Therapy Work for Children with Autism?
How Does Online Autism Therapy at Home Work?
7 SLP Recommended Family Activities for Children with Autism
How Does Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) Affect Communication?
People with ASD often face challenges with both verbal and nonverbal communication. Here's a breakdown of some key areas where difficulties may arise:
Interpersonal Communication: Interpersonal communication involves making eye contact, turn-taking during a conversation, staying on topic, understanding, using spoken language meaningfully, and developing nonverbal communication and conversational skills. It can also involve emotional and self-regulation while interacting with others, understanding other people's points of view, and interpreting nonverbal cues like facial expressions, gestures, and body language. An autistic person may struggle with all these aspects, making social interaction difficult.
Understanding Nonverbal Cues: Difficulty interpreting nonverbal cues like facial expressions, body language, and tone of voice can lead to misunderstandings and awkward social interactions. For example, an autistic person might not understand if someone is being sarcastic or playful.
Abstract Language: Abstract concepts like "happy," "sad," or "freedom" can be challenging to grasp for people with ASD. They may take things literally and struggle to understand figurative language like jokes, sarcasm, or metaphors.
Emotional Regulation: Difficulty managing emotions can lead to outbursts or meltdowns when feeling overwhelmed. Autistic individuals may struggle to express or understand others' emotions, making it hard to build rapport and navigate social situations.
Making Inferences: "Reading between the lines" is a complex skill that involves inferring meaning from context. An autistic person might miss subtle cues or hidden meanings in conversations, leading to confusion.
Additional Considerations:
Flexible Thinking: Shifting thoughts or plans in response to a situation can be challenging for an autistic person. They may struggle to adapt to changes in conversation or activities.
Collaborative Skills: Effectively working with others towards a common goal can be difficult due to verbal and nonverbal communication and emotional regulation challenges.
Does Speech Therapy Work for Children with Autism?
A speech-language pathologist (SLP) can address the social skills needed to help autistic people 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.
Autistic individuals can work with a speech therapist on their speech, language, and communication skills. Early interventions and activities at home can significantly aid in speech and language development for children on the autism spectrum.
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 rely on their speech to communicate effectively. This can include using communication boards or computers with symbols that generate speech using a digitized or recorded voice.
Additionally, the picture exchange communication system (PECS) can assist communication. A speech therapist can also help individuals to use gestures to communicate. Sign language is another effective method to develop functional speech, especially for children needing additional assistance.
The role of a speech-language pathologist is to match each of these approaches to the individual's communication needs.
How Does Online Autism Therapy at Home Work?
Some might assume that in-person therapy sessions are the best way to deliver speech therapy for adults and children. While in-person autism therapy has benefits, transferring skills learned in treatment to the everyday world can be challenging. This is where online speech therapy emerges as a potential solution.
Online speech therapy allows the speech therapist to work closely with both the autistic individual and their family in their familiar home environment. This fosters the development of meaningful goals that seamlessly integrate into daily routines. Furthermore, family involvement becomes effortless, enabling them to reinforce strategies learned in therapy throughout the day.
Speech therapy for autism 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 speech and language assessment will focus on social communication skills 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.
While online speech therapy offers significant advantages, it's important to acknowledge that it might not be suitable for everyone. A comprehensive assessment by a qualified professional can help determine if online therapy is the right fit for your specific needs. This initial assessment will consider factors like the individual's age, severity of communication challenges, and learning style.
Ultimately, the most effective speech therapy approach is the one that best addresses the individual's needs. Whether online or in-person, successful therapy empowers autistic individuals to develop their communication skills and thrive daily.
7 SLP Recommended Family Activities for Children with Autism
1. Feeling Faces
Teaching children social skills is crucial, and this is a great game to target social skills and help your child learn about emotions. 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 a person identify 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. 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 promotes 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 finished dressing, 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 have fun looking for Waldo and 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.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What form of therapy is best for autism?
There is no one-size-fits-all therapy for autism, as the best approach depends on the individual's specific needs and challenges. However, several evidence-based therapies have proven effective for many individuals with autism struggle, including:
Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA): Focuses on improving specific behaviors and skills through positive reinforcement.
Speech and Language Therapy: Helps improve both verbal and nonverbal communication skills.
Occupational Therapy (OT): Aims to develop fine motor skills, sensory processing, and daily living skills.
Social Skills Training: Teaches individuals how to interact appropriately with others in social situations.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT): Helps manage anxiety, depression, and other emotional challenges.
Physical Therapy (PT): Assists with improving motor skills and physical coordination.
The most effective treatment plan often involves a combination of these therapies tailored to the individual's needs.
2. When is it too late to treat autism?
It is never too late to treat autism. While early intervention is highly beneficial and can lead to better outcomes, individuals with autism can benefit from speech therapy and support at any age.
Adolescents and adults with autism can still progress significantly in developing communication, social skills, and adaptive behaviors. Continuous support and tailored interventions can improve quality of life and help autistic individuals achieve their full potential regardless of when they begin treatment.
Connected Speech Pathology - Online Speech Therapy Services
At Connected Speech Pathology, our speech-language pathologists can provide speech-language therapy for autistic people. Our compassionate speech therapists have years of experience working with expressive and receptive language and social communication skills.
The initial step to getting started with us 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.
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. Providing online speech therapy for autism services in the home has exponential potential for improvement.
Summary
Effective communication is crucial for autistic individuals, who often face significant verbal and nonverbal challenges. Online speech therapy provides flexible, accessible interventions tailored to each individual's needs, involving family members.
Speech-language pathologists teach children social skills and improve communication abilities using methods like augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) for nonverbal individuals. Early intervention and consistent support can significantly enhance communication development, improving the overall quality of life of autistic individuals.
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.
