Ming (Agents of Speech) explains differences and overlaps between occupational therapy (OT), ABA, and speech therapy. OT focuses on fine motor skills (painting, drawing, grasping) and cognition through stepwise skill breakdowns; speech therapy emphasizes building language content via tasks like matching and categorization, which overlap with OT and ABA.
OT would teach fine motor skills, such as painting, drawing, grasping things. And what they do is they break down the skill to small pieces and teach the child step by step. The other things that occupational therapists teach is cognitive tasks, which overlaps a lot with ABA stuff and also with speech therapy stuff. So what cognitive tasks are there and how does it overlap? Usually for us speech therapists, we don't really put our focus there, but we do matching and also categorization. And that's because it builds up the content, the language content, their language skills. In that way, we're just teaching the concept there. All right. Whereas ot, their main focus is about their cognition, and us is like building up language. So it's a little bit different. They are interconnected, obviously, but our focuses are different, and why we do it is different.
