The term “communication disorder” covers a broad range of disorders that affect speech and language. A communication disorder can be categorized as: an articulation disorder, a fluency disorder, a voice disorder, a language disorder, and/or a phonological disorder. Communication disorders can occur alone or can be a result of another condition, such as autism, brain damage due to birth defects, etc. The link below provides some facts and figures about these types of communication disorders: http://www.rhsc.org/files/communication-disorders.pdf. 

            Today I am going to discuss the communication disorder known as Childhood Apraxia of Speech (CAS). “Childhood Apraxia of Speech is an oral-motor disorder (mouth-movement problem) that causes the child’s speech to be hard to understand. It is usually detected after two years of age, when speech development is noted to be delayed” (Cincinnati Children’s). According to http://testyyettrying.blogspot.com/2011/04/what-is-childhood-apraxia-of-speech-and.html, CAS is “a relatively uncommon neurological disorder caused by problems with motor planning and programming of the movements necessary to produce speech. Children with Childhood Apraxia of Speech do not have a problem with the actual structures and muscles involved in speech production. There is no evidence of weakness in the muscles of the face, jaw, lips, or tongue. Children with CAS also generally do not have problems knowing what they want to say. They can formulate the message in their mind and the muscles are capable of producing speech. The message just doesn't travel from the brain to the mouth properly.”         

            Ultimately, apraxia of speech in the inability to say or “get out” what you want to say, even though you have the ability to form a clear message in your mind and the physical strength and structures to produce sounds/words (lips, tongue, palate, etc.). Usually children with CAS are late talkers who babble infrequently and use one or two sounds for everything, often relying on grunting and pointing for communication. Some characteristics of CAS that SLP’s and families can look for are:  “child makes more errors when attempting to produce longer words or phrases (multi-syllable words or multi-word sentences), child has abnormal prosody (unusual stress patterns, intonation, volume control, and rate issues), errors are inconsistent, if the child says the same multi-syllable word three times it will come out differently each time, child has a reduced number of vowels and demonstrates vowel errors, child has significant difficulty imitating words and phrases, child uses predominantly simple syllable shapes (they substitute shorter, simpler words for longer, more complicated ones)”.

            I can only imagine how frustrating CAS would be for the child and for the family members. Luckily, CAS can be addressed with speech therapy. Some interventions/methods of therapy for CAS include helping children learn new motor skills (movements for speech sounds and words), frequent practice of sounds, and rebuilding of connections from the brain to the mouth. It is important that parents practice these sounds and movements at home with their children as well. Articulation picture cards for one and two syllable words, games, forming and ordering words into sentences, mirror work, and message boards are all things that SLP’s and parents might use to address CAS. 

Additional information and resources for parents can be found at: http://testyyettrying.blogspot.com/p/childhood-apraxia-of-speech-resource.html

http://www.asha.org/public/speech/disorders/childhoodapraxia.htm

www.cincinnatichildrens.org/health/v/verbal-apraxia/