Speech Therapy
What is Speech Pathology?
Speech Pathology is dedicated to helping children and their families develop effective and meaningful communication skills. At Think Autism, our Speech Pathologists work collaboratively with families to enhance each child's ability to understand, express themselves, and interact across various settings, including home, school, and social environments. We embrace diverse communication styles and focus on empowering each individual to communicate in ways that are comfortable and natural for them.
How can our Speech Pathologists help?
Our Speech Pathologists offer support in the following areas:
Language development: We support children to understand, acquire and use language to understand the world around them and clearly express their thoughts and ideas.
Social communication: We support children in developing skills to build strong relationships with important people in their lives. We also support families to understand their child’s communication preferences, style and needs.
Literacy skills: We support children in developing essential reading skills including phonemic awareness, decoding and comprehension. Our approach includes phonology, which helps children understand and manipulate the sound structures of language to improve reading accuracy and fluency.
Speech sound skills: Our Speech Pathologists work directly with your child to improve your child’s ability to produce and combine speech sounds so they can clearly communicate with others. To have the best outcomes a child generally needs to be motivated to work on this type of goal. It may be appropriate to support foundation communication skills before specific sounds.
Mealtimes: Eating, drinking and mealtimes are an important part of your child’s daily routine and can influenced by many factors. We work in a multidisciplinary family-centred way to support your child to have more enjoyable, independent and safe mealtimes.
Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC): Our Speech Pathologists encourage the use of multimodal strategies such as the use of pictures, gestures and body language. We also use specialist knowledge to assess, prescribe and support children to use aided (e.g., speech-generating devices) and unaided forms of AAC (e.g., signing).
