Speech Regression After Starting Therapy...

My son didn't actually do this, but then again, he wasn't stringing words into sentences like your daughter was. I wouldn't worry too much about it.

Are you doing a home program with her everyday? It is not enough to have 2 lessons a week. The home program, twice a day, is what really teaches her. Talk to your speech therapist about that. Also talk about exactly what to do when she doesn't want to talk to you.

My son would grunt or point A LOT and I had to be a bit tough on him. If he wouldn't try, I wouldn't give whatever it was that he wanted to him until he did. Sometimes that caused tears or meltdowns. Eventually, he gave up fighting me and things got better.

I'm sure your lady will explain a lot to you about it - good luck!
Dawn

This happens all the time ... they do well, then they get overwhelmed because as humans we naturally get excited then raise our expectations, they get scared and do not know what to do with it and just shut down. Your BEST plan of action, and I think you therepist will agree is to back off a bit and only ask for words when REQUIRED - like for a command:
Hungry, Food, Diaper, Drink etc. Discuss with your therepist what should/should not be pushed at this time.

For us, the words above were our "push" words and even that was asking him to say it vs sign only three times after that we accepted it and moved on.

She is focusing more on how the word feels in her mouth, how she forms the letters, her mind is starting to connect the dots and she is just taking more time to process and utilize the therapy.

I think this would be an expected step. When I did speech therapy with my people at an ICF-MR I would work with them daily.

I had some that I was teaching sign language since they were non verbal, I was working with some others to try and speak. I had no formal training what so ever but did do a written speech plan that the Doc/speech therapist had me do.

I can tell you that when their brain engaged and they were trying to do what I was teaching them it seemed like they went backwards too.

Both of my kids did this. My son realized he couldn't form the words, so would just spend tons of time by himself practicing how words felt. My daughter seemed to get that people couldn't understand her anyway, so when we started speech therapy and it didn't fix it immediately, she quit trying, seemingly from embarrassment. They were both close to their 2nd birthdays when we started. They both had speech apraxia, if that helps. One was from brain confusion, the other was from using wrong muscles. Hang in there. My kids are now 4 and 5 and never shut up! :)