Does ABA Therapy Help with Speech?
Children with autism typically face challenges with speech and communication1. They often struggle to not only understand how others communicate, but also how to express what they are feeling and what they want or need.
Communication is one of the basic skills that everyone needs to grasp to succeed in life. That’s why it’s so important that children who are diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) get the help they need to build their communication skills and, as a result, their ability to speak and be understood.
One of the main goals of applied behavioral analysis, or ABA therapy, is to help children with autism build these communication skills and improve their speech.
While ABA therapy is not speech therapy in the traditional sense, it does focus heavily on helping patients with ASD build their speech skills.
Here’s how it does that, and how it differs from traditional speech therapy.
Learn more about how ABA Therapy can help children with autism learn communication skills
Table Of Contents
How Does ABA Therapy Improve Speech?
ABA therapy focuses heavily on helping children with autism build their communication skills. This includes absorbing and understanding communication cues and responding in appropriate ways.
It also includes helping patients express themselves in a more effective way. This is an essential task in life, though it’s one that many of us who don’t have ASD take for granted.
There are many different tactics that ABA therapy takes to improve speech. One example is using visual cues — such as pictures, flashcards and more — to help teach children with ASD what certain symbols and words mean. ABA therapists use positive reinforcement as a rewards-like system to incentivize patients to learn and retain that information.
Over time, with repetition, patients learn these skills, which in turn improves their overall communication.
The reason why ABA therapy is so effective at improving speech is that it works on both ends of speech — both the understanding and the reception of speech/information, and then the expression of that speech. Children with ASD can benefit from ABA therapy by learning to better understand and then express their language better.
What are Some of the Tactics ABA Therapists Use to Improve Speech?
ABA therapists will integrate a number of basic tactics to teach children how to better communicate.
In addition to the visual cues described above, ABA therapists will teach children with autism how to do basic things with their mouth. This includes blowing kisses and bubbles; making sounds with their tongue, mouth and lips; and making other basic sounds that are critical for language and speech.
Once taught some of these basic skills, children who are facing significant communication and speech challenges can build upon them to do even more. After children learn how to speak, for instance, they can then learn how to build a wider vocabulary, which is essential for effective communication.
In doing so, they’ll be able to communicate how they’re feeling and what they need, as well as express simple things such as gratitude for those who help them. They’ll be better able to identify people, places and things as they develop the ability to form complex sentences.
ABA therapy can even help children learn some of language’s subtleties such as humor and sarcasm.
How Does ABA Therapy Differ from Traditional Speech Therapy?
While ABA therapy certainly improves speech, there are some key differences between traditional speech therapy.
Perhaps most importantly, ABA therapy is tailored for patients who have developmental disabilities, such as autism or other conditions covered under the ASD umbrella. In addition, ABA therapy doesn’t only focus on speech. It also helps patients develop social skills that they need to succeed in life.
Trained, licensed and certified ABA therapists administer the treatment2, which can be done in a patient’s home or in a clinical setting.
Traditional speech therapy, by contrast, is usually administered by a speech-language pathologist. It also typically focuses on just improving a patient’s speech, and not other aspects of their life.
It is used in many different applications for many different people, though not often for children who are on the autism spectrum. Traditional speech therapy does, however, use a lot of the same principles as ABA therapy and works for children who are behind in their typical developmental schedule in regard to speech.
Blue Gems ABA Helps Children Improve Their Speech
Speech and communication are basic, essential life skills. Many of us take for granted that we’re easily able to understand language and express it as well.
For many children with autism, these skills don’t come naturally, and they face many challenges in understanding and expressing language.
At Blue Gems ABA, our trained and certified ABA therapists help patients everyday develop the communication and social skills that they need to succeed in life. We also have a team of clinical psychologists who complete ASD evaluations to determine whether someone has autism.
For more information on what we can do for your child, please contact us today.
617-297-7998
617-340-3371
info@bluegemsaba.com
English 
Spanish