Speech therapy activities for adults
Speech therapy activities for adults can help clients regain their independence after a stroke, traumatic brain injury (TBI), or neurological diagnosis by addressing a wide range of communication challenges.
Speech-Language Pathologists (SLPs) can also help adults by addressing voice disorders or age-related changes.
Summary
- Adult speech therapy should focus on functional, meaningful activities that support real-world communication, cognition, voice, and swallowing needs. Download my free cognitive speech therapy activities for adults PDF.
- Therapy goals vary by diagnosis but often target communication independence, cognitive-communication skills, speech intelligibility, and vocal quality
- Effective interventions include aphasia exercises, cognitive-communication tasks, voice therapy activities, and personalized home exercise programs
- Teletherapy through a secure EHR can successfully deliver adult speech therapy services, using digital tools, screen sharing, and everyday online activities to promote carryover and engagement.
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Effective therapy activities are individualized according to each client’s daily communication needs, goals, and interests. Meaningful, functional therapy activities incorporated into in-person or remote speech therapy sessions can help adults improve their communication skills and participation in everyday life.
Goals of speech therapy activities for adults
Adult speech therapy goals are typically centered around helping individuals communicate as effectively and independently as possible. Therapy is largely rehabilitative or compensatory, and specific goals vary depending on the client’s underlying diagnosis.
Primary adult speech therapy goals include:
- Improving functional communication skills: Restoring expressive language skills to help clients effectively express their wants, needs, and thoughts.
- Enhancing cognitive-communication skills: Improving memory, attention, and problem-solving so the individual can safely navigate daily life.
- Increasing speech intelligibility: Teaching compensatory strategies to enhance articulation so the client’s speech is more easily understood by others.
- Strengthening voice: Increasing vocal quality (volume, pitch, and clarity) and vocal endurance. This is especially important for clients with Parkinson’s disease or vocal fold pathologies.
- Supporting receptive language skills: Helping individuals to participate in work, social, and community activities.
- Ensuring safe swallowing: Adult SLP care often involves addressing swallowing disorders (Dysphagia), such as through diet modification and the use of compensatory strategies.
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Effective speech therapy activities for adults
When developing treatment plans for adult clients, SLPs should focus on functional goals. Therapy activities should be directly tied to the individual’s actual life, hobbies, and routines.
Aphasia exercises
Aphasia is an acquired neurogenic language disorder resulting from brain injury, such as a stroke. Speech therapy goals may focus on improving the individual’s ability to communicate by targeting understanding, expression, reading, and/or writing.
Examples of common aphasia exercises include:
- Word retrieval tasks: Generating items within a given category, naming pictures, or describing objects.
- Semantic Feature Analysis (SFA): Describing the features of an object (such as what it looks like or where it’s found) to strengthen the neural networks surrounding the targeted word.
- Sentence completion activities: Filling in missing words or finishing familiar phrases.
- Conversational practice: Engaging in discussions about current events, personal experiences, or familiar topics.
- Script training: Practice using customized, functional scripts to complete daily tasks such as ordering food or making a doctor’s appointment over the phone.
- Melodic Intonation Therapy (MIT): An evidence-based treatment approach that uses the musical elements of speech (rhythm and pitch) to improve expressive language skills.
Cognitive communication tasks
Cognitive-communication exercises focus on improving the client’s attention, memory, executive functioning, and problem-solving skills. This allows the client to manage everyday responsibilities and social interactions.
Cognitive-communication activities include:
- Functional problem solving: Working through solutions during a discussion of real-life scenarios, such as planning transportation or losing your wallet at the grocery store.
- Memory exercises: Practice recalling information such as appointments, items on a shopping list, or details from a short story.
- Organization activities: Categorizing information, creating a daily schedule, or prioritizing tasks.
- Executive functioning tasks: Planning an event, developing a weekly menu, and creating a grocery list.
These activities are often more effective than isolated drills because they mirror real-world demands and promote generalization to the client’s daily life.
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Voice therapy activities
Voice therapy helps individuals who experience vocal fatigue, hoarseness, reduced vocal intensity, or other voice disorders.
Therapy activities that help clients regain vocal strength, endurance, and quality include:
- Breathing exercises: SLPs teach clients how to use diaphragmatic breathing to support louder, clearer, and more sustained speech. This involves breathing deeply from the diaphragm rather than taking shallow breaths from the chest.
- Pitch and loudness practice: Modifying the intensity and pitch of the voice can lead to clearer communication.
- Vocal Function Exercises (VFEs): A standardized voice therapy program designed to strengthen and balance the laryngeal muscles, and ultimately improve vocal fold strength, endurance, flexibility, and efficiency. Exercises include sustaining /i/ (“eee”) for as long as possible, and pitch glide from low to high or high to low.
Home exercise programs
Home exercise programs can effectively reinforce and generalize skills learned during therapy sessions into the client’s everyday life.
An effective home exercise program is:
- Personalized to the individual’s goals
- Integrated into daily routines when possible
- Easy to understand and independently complete
- Realistic in terms of the amount of effort and time needed
Examples include:
- Practicing word retrieval by naming three items in a specific category (e.g., medications they take, foods in the fridge) during their morning routine.
- Completing memory exercises using a daily planner.
- Reading emails or the daily mail to practice reading comprehension and visual scanning.
- Performing voice exercises through a recording so the client can self-monitor their vocal volume and compare it to previous days.
Teletherapy adaptations of speech therapy activities for adults
Teletherapy is a convenient, effective service delivery model for adult speech therapy that has become increasingly popular. SLPs can adapt many traditional adult speech therapy activities for virtual sessions.
Common examples include:
- Engaging in online memory and problem-solving activities
- Using screen-sharing and digital worksheets for language and executive functioning exercises (e.g., pull up a client’s local grocery store website to target word retrieval or create a shopping list)
- Practicing conversation skills through secure video conferencing
- Reviewing emails or online news articles for reading comprehension.
- Using the webcam feed as a mirror to monitor articulatory placement during speech production exercises.
By incorporating functional and engaging activities, SLPs can deliver efficient services with teletherapy software like TheraPlatform. Added benefits of teletherapy include additional opportunities to target functional communication within the individual’s home environment, which can improve carryover and increase relevance.
What to avoid when using speech therapy activities for adults
Adult speech therapy activities should be meaningful and functional. SLPs should avoid:
- Presenting activities that are too high above or below the client’s skill level
- Focusing on repetitive drills or tasks that do not show clear relevance to the individual’s daily life.
- Assigning a home exercise plan that is overly complex or time-consuming
- Overlooking the importance of the caregiver’s role. Providing caregiver education on strategies and obtaining input are key components of speech therapy with adults.
Speech therapy activities for adults can help clients improve their communication, cognitive, and voice skills while enhancing their participation in everyday life. Whether targeting voice with a client diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease or aphasia and cognitive communication with a client who experienced a stroke, SLPs can make an impact through functional therapy exercises.
How EHRs can help with documentation
Modern EHR/practice management platforms (such as TheraPlatform) assist greatly with documentation by providing HIPAA‑compliant, integrated systems for note entry, storage, scheduling, and billing.
They allow therapists to:
- Use and customize templates (e.g., SOAP, DAP, and others) or build their own to streamline note writing and ensure consistency.
- Link notes to treatment plans, goals, and session history so client progress is easily tracked over time.
- Utilize e-fax and secure document sharing via client portal to safely exchange information with clients or other providers while maintaining confidentiality.
- Leverage dictation and telehealth transcription, which can automatically convert sessions into therapy or assessment notes, saving time and reducing manual entry.
- Take advantage of AI features that streamline documentation by automatically populating intake form data into assessment templates and generating complete therapy and assessment notes from the information you provide, all with a single click.
Watch this video to learn how to save time on therapy notes
Meanwhile, AI‑assisted note tools are emerging which can further help clinicians by:
- Automatically transcribing session audio (if permitted) and highlighting key moments (e.g. emotional shifts, major themes).
- Suggesting draft notes or filling in objective or assessment sections based on observed data, freeing up clinicians’ time.
- Supporting consistency and reducing missing components in notes, which helps from both clinical, legal, and insurance perspectives.
Together, structured SOAP‑type notes, good EHR platforms, and smart AI tools support better therapeutic outcomes, more efficient workflows, and stronger accountability.
Streamline your practice with One EHR
- Scheduling
- Flexible notes
- Template library
- Billing & payments
- Insurance claims
- Client portal
- Telehealth
- E-fax
Resources for speech therapists
TheraPlatform is an all-in-one EHR, practice management, and teletherapy software with AI-powered notes built for therapists to help them save time on admin tasks. It offers a 30-day risk-free trial with no credit card required and supports different industries and sizes of practices, including speech-language pathologists in group and solo practices.
More resources
- Therapy resources and worksheets
- Therapy private practice courses
- Ultimate teletherapy ebook
- The Ultimate Insurance Billing Guide for Therapists
- The Ultimate Guide to Starting a Private Therapy Practice
- Insurance billing 101
- Practice management tools
Free video classes
- Free on-demand insurance billing for therapist course
- Free mini video lessons to enhance your private practice
- 9 Admin tasks to automate in your private practice
References
Popescu, T., Stahl, B., Wiernik, B. M., Haiduk, F., Zemanek, M., Helm, H., ... & Fitch, W. T. (2022). Melodic Intonation Therapy for aphasia: A multi‐level meta‐analysis of randomized controlled trials and individual participant data. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1516(1), 76-84. https://nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/nyas.14848
Raymer, A. M., & Roitsch, J. (2023). Word retrieval treatments in aphasia: A survey of professional practice. Aphasiology, 37(7), 954-979. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02687038.2022.2063791
Ribeiro, V. V., Nascimento, W., da Silva, R. C., Gonçalves, F. M., Santos, R. S., Behlau, M., ... & Taveira, K. V. M. (2023). Evidence on vocal interventions in adults: a scoping review. Journal of Voice. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvoice.2023.03.005
FAQs about speech therapy activities for adults
What are the most effective speech therapy activities for adults?
The most effective activities are functional and personalized, such as word retrieval exercises, conversational practice, problem-solving tasks, memory activities, and voice exercises tied to daily life.
Can speech therapy help adults after a stroke or brain injury?
Yes. Speech therapy can improve communication, cognitive-communication skills, speech clarity, and swallowing function following conditions such as stroke or traumatic brain injury.
How can teletherapy be used for adult speech therapy?
Teletherapy supports activities like conversation practice, reading comprehension, memory tasks, executive functioning exercises, and voice therapy through secure video sessions and digital resources.
