Autism-World

Q: Does anyone know of any good therapy to help a young autistic girl who has a large single-word vocabulary, put those words into coherent sentences?

Answer:

I would certainly recommend working with a speech therapist or speech pathologist, or checking to see if this service is available at your child’s school. If it is provided through the public school, it should be free, so this may be a good place to start.

To work on this at home, there are several things you might try. You mentioned that she has a large vocabulary, so you might start with teaching her to use a two word “sentence” to request favorite things. You could prompt her to say, “want cookie” or “want blocks,” etc. I would only begin this if she already says the name of an item to request it, if not, you might start there and then work up to “want _______,” and then “I want _________.”

Also you could start teaching her descriptive words about some of her favorite toys or games, such as “big ball,” or “red car,” etc.

A good book that discusses speech development is “Overcoming Autism” by Lynn Koegel and Claire LaZebnik.

Good luck~!

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This entry was posted on Friday, September 28th, 2007 at 1:19 pm and is filed under Ask and answer.