Speech therapy Adelaide: How Occupational and Speech Therapists Work Together

Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) and ABA professionals often collaborate. While ABA therapy is most frequently employed to treat autism spectrum disorders, it can also help develop behavioural, motor, and learning abilities in individuals of all ages.

Regis College’s online Master of Science in Applied Behaviour Analysis trains students in using behavioural principles when treating communication disorders.

Feeding and Swallowing Therapy

Feeding and swallowing therapy is designed to assist children who struggle with feeding disorders, picky eating or difficulty chewing/swallowing. Such issues may lead to poor growth and nutrition in young people. Our occupational behavioural and speech therapy Adelaide experts have extensive training in paediatric feeding/swallowing therapy to effectively treat mild to severe feeding concerns.

Our therapists carefully assess your child’s feeding and swallowing capabilities before developing an individualized care plan to meet their and your family’s unique needs. They may use various approaches or therapies such as sucking, drinking, chewing, positioning strategies for safe swallowing or manoeuvres to facilitate safe swallowing.

Children who struggle to swallow may experience aspiration (food or liquid entering the airway) and choking, making professional advice essential. SLPs possess extensive knowledge about the anatomy of the mouth, throat and larynx, how the muscles of the chewing and swallowing process function together, as well as ways that bodies normally protect airways during these movements.

Treatment for swallowing disorders may involve techniques designed to increase volume and food variety while decreasing sensory aversions or negative behavioural responses to food or feeding. Your physician may refer you for a video fluoroscopic swallow study or fibreoptic endoscopic evaluation of swallowing (FEES) assessment to further assess your child’s swallow.

Verbal Behaviour Therapy

Verbal behaviour therapy uses a particular technique to teach communication skills. It begins by teaching the student to associate certain words with desired outcomes; for instance, when they say “marker,” the therapist immediately brings over one to reinforce that association and reinforce it further as time goes on. As the child advances in their training program, their therapist may increase how often they say the desired item before receiving it.

Like ABA, behavioural enactment therapy (VB) programs are tailored to each child’s skill set. A Board Certified Behaviour Analyst may develop a plan that includes goals and targets the child needs to reach. Therapists providing VB are typically BCBAs, special education teachers or speech and language pathologists.

Behavioural and speech therapy Adelaide therapists employ a natural environment approach to learning. This method gives clients more opportunities to interact in their natural environments and helps generalize behaviours more quickly while encouraging spontaneous verbal behaviour. It is particularly useful for children who may engage in negative behaviours in artificial settings; by switching up the environment, they may find relief from negative impulses.

Therapists will teach students to make more complex requests while teaching other verbal operants, such as echoes, tacting, and intraverbals.

Articulation Therapy

Articulation therapy (sometimes called sound therapy) involves individual sessions where your child works to improve their pronunciation with help from an SLP, practising different sounds with them and providing drills that you can use at home to assist in their progress.

Based on the severity of your child’s articulation disorder, an appropriate treatment plan will be created to help correct their speech sound errors. Traditional articulation therapy approaches usually start by isolating individual sounds before progressing to working on them at multiple levels – from isolated sounds through words (initial, medial and final), phrases and conversations/stories-level tasks.

Social Skills Therapy

Therapists also consider psychological aspects underlying an individual’s difficulties with social skills, including anxiety or an acquired brain injury such as schizophrenia or traumatic brain trauma. A therapist then determines which social skills to focus on and the most efficient way to teach them.

People seeking social skills therapy frequently struggle with understanding social cues such as body language, facial expressions and the tone of voice used during conversations. Therefore, social skills therapy must address all these aspects so the individual can interact more naturally with others.