A short YouTube talk by Ming (Agents of Speech) explaining the purposes of speech therapy and occupational therapy. The speaker defines speech vs. language (speech = producing sounds/pronunciation; language = encoding messages, sentence structure) and contrasts speech therapy’s role with occupational therapy’s role in helping with sensory, motor skills, and daily/occupational tasks for children and adults.
In general, speech therapy is to help someone, child or an adult, to get their message across, which is all about communication. Communication is a big umbrella term. There are two parts to it at the very least. There are speech and language. Speech is to deal with any mispronunciations, unable to say certain sounds. Is it because of oral motor difficulties or other reasons. That's in the speech department, all about making sounds. Whereas language, on the other hand, is how we encode our message. Within language, there's a lot of stuff that can be done. It could be sentence length, grammatical structures. Occupational therapy, on the other hand, helps with sensory. That's at least from my perspective. From an ST's perspective, that's what I think helps the most. Occupational therapy is to help someone, also child or adult, to get on with their lives, to do their jobs. Basically that's why it's called occupational therapy. A child's job might be to be a student. That's why they need to learn how to write, how to sit down, how to type and use their fingers and grasp things. And adults also need these things if they had a traumatic injury.
