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What is Apraxia?
Childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) is a motor speech disorder. Children with CAS have problems saying sounds, syllables, and words. This is not because of muscle weakness or paralysis. The brain has problems planning to move the body parts (e.g., lips, jaw, tongue) needed for speech. The child knows what he or she wants to say, but his/her brain has difficulty coordinating the muscle movements necessary to say those words.
What are Signs or Symptoms?
Of course not all children are going to have every issue listed here.
A Very Young Child
- Does not coo or babble as an infant (We called him "The silent Baby." Nuff Said.)
- First words are late, and they may be missing sounds (First words came WAY after he was 18 months old)
- Only a few different consonant and vowel sounds (He uses these few sounds he can make and creates his own words.)
- Problems combining sounds; may show long pauses between sounds (He definitely has problems with combining sounds)
- Simplifies words by replacing difficult sounds with easier ones or by deleting difficult sounds (although all children do this, the child with apraxia of speech does so more often) (He not only deletes problematic sounds but creates new words.)
- May have problems eating (I would venture to say 6 months of feeding therapy to figure out how to chew constitutes an eating problem.)
An Older Child
Yes, I realize he's not really 'older' yet but he still falls into most of these categories.
- Makes inconsistent sound errors that are not the result of immaturity (he's only 3 so we can still blame some of it on immaturity)
- Can understand language much better than he or she can talk (There is very little he doesn't understand and he has no problem following commands.)
- Has difficulty imitating speech, but imitated speech is more clear than spontaneous speech (IF he can imitate what you're saying then Yes)
- May appear to be groping when attempting to produce sounds or to coordinate the lips, tongue, and jaw for purposeful movement (YUP)
- Has more difficulty saying longer words or phrases clearly than shorter ones (We're working on getting him to use more 3 word phrases and he's 3 years old!)
- Appears to have more difficulty when he or she is anxious (You can tell the poor child gets so frustrated sometimes)
- Is hard to understand, especially for an unfamiliar listener (We joke he's going to need the "Little Man Dictionary" to be able to attend preschool)
- Sounds choppy, monotonous, or stresses the wrong syllable or word (That would be a good description)
- Weakness of the lips, jaw, and/or tongue
- Delayed language development
- Other expressive language problems like word order confusions and word recall
- Difficulties with fine motor movement/coordination
- Over sensitive (hypersensitive) or under sensitive (hyposensitive) in their mouths (e.g., may not like toothbrushing or crunchy foods, may not be able to identify an object in their mouth through touch)
- Children with CAS or other speech problems may have problems when learning to read, spell, and write
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And there you have it. A quick summary of Apraxia. I'm going to put together a short video with him saying the words he's made up. Just one example: the word 'YES' is "Ah-hee" in his world. One thing the can happen is that you'll hear a word and then it will disappear from their vocabulary. The word, 'kitty' is one example of that for us. As is the word, 'yes'. When he first started saying YES he would say, "essssss" and all of a sudden one day he decided it was "Ah-hee."
I can't even phonetically spell his word for Thomas (the Tank). :0) Yes, this will be a fun experiment and fantastic to document his progress since we are just at the beginning of his intensive therapy. This should be interesting. Anyone want to take a guess at how many "takes" it will take to get him to cooperate with me? LOL.
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