Speech Therapy

What is speech therapy?

Speech-language pathologists (SLP) provide speech therapy services. They have a master’s degree and are specially licensed to practice through the state.

Speech-language therapy addresses challenges with language and communication. It can help children with autism improve their verbal, nonverbal, and social communication. The overall goal is to help the child communicate in more useful and functional ways.

A speech therapy program begins with an evaluation by a speech-language pathologist (SLP) to assess the child’s communication strengths and challenges. From this evaluation, the SLP creates individual goals for therapy.

Examples of the skills that speech therapy may work on include:

• Making clearer speech sounds
• Matching emotions with the correct facial expression
• Understanding body language
• Responding to questions
• Matching a picture with its meaning
• Using a speech app on an iPad to produce the correct word
• Modulating tone of voice