I am thrilled to feature this guest post by Alyssa Gilligan, M.S., CCC-SLP. Alyssa is the founder/owner of Crescendo Speech Therapy in Baltimore, Maryland. She specializes in treating children with autism spectrum disorder and motor speech disorders with a focus on early intervention. She graduated with her masters in speech-language pathology from Towson University and has been a speech-language pathologist for 6 years. www.crescendospeechtherapy.com
May is Apraxia Awareness month! Childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) is a congenital, neurological motor speech disorder that impairs a child’s ability to motor plan the oral movements needed to produce words. Children with CAS typically have a good understanding of language but are not able to express themselves and approximately 1 in 1000 children will be diagnosed with CAS.
The act of speaking is actually quite complicated! It starts with an idea that is formulated into words and/or phrases. Your brain then has to decide what sounds and in what order are needed to say each word. Your brain sends that information to your muscles in your mouth that are needed to move. Then you move your muscles! Children with CAS have difficulty sequencing the sounds in the correct order and then sending that message to their muscles.
Common symptoms of CAS include highly inconsistent speech with frequent vowel errors and will often say the same word many different ways. They may have prolonged pauses between sounds or syllables as well as inappropriate stress on syllables or words. You may also notice “groping” behaviors in which you may notice your child struggle to achieve the correct mouth posture to produce the word. CAS may be diagnosed by a speech-language pathologist that has experience with motor speech disorders. You can find an experienced SLP on the Apraxia-Kids.org website!
CAS requires a special type of speech therapy that is specific to motor speech disorders and often involves multi-sensory cues including touch cues, visual cues, and auditory cues. Additionally, it is recommended that they participate in intensive speech therapy for at least 2-4 days a week.
Interventions specific to CAS include Dynamic, Temporal, and Tactile Cueing (DTTC), Rapid Syllable Transition Training (ReST) and Prompts for Restructuring Oral Muscular Phonetic Targets (PROMPT) therapy.
With the right speech therapy and the support of the entire community, children with apraxia can and do make amazing progress in the ability to speak!
-Alyssa S. Gilligan, M.S., CCC-SLP