For many parents in Central Florida, distinguishing if your child a late talker or have a speech development issue, such as verbal Apraxia, can be exhausting. If you look online and try to do your own research, it can further complicate the situation with too much information and different terms.
If you have any questions about your child speech or language, it is best to talk with a professional Speech Therapist.
Signs and symptoms of Childhood Apraxia of Speech (CAS) according to the American Speech Language Hearing Association
Inconsistent errors on consonants and vowels in repeated productions of syllables or words.
Lengthened and disrupted coarticulatory transitions between sounds and syllables.
Inappropriate prosody, especially in the realization of lexical or phrasal stress.
Other Reported Characteristics
Other characteristics that have been reported in children diagnosed with CAS and that represent difficulty with the planning and programming movement gestures for speech include
articulatory groping—articulatory searching prior to phonating;
consonant distortions;
difficulty with smooth, accurate movement transitions from one sound to the next;
increasing difficulty with longer or more complex syllable and word shapes;
schwa additions/insertions—insertion of schwa between consonants or at the end of words;
slower than typical rate of speech
syllable segregation—pauses between sounds, syllables, or words that affect smooth transitions;
voicing errors—voiceless sounds produced as their voiced cognates; and
vowel errors—vowel distortions or substitutions.
The presence of error patterns in the child’s speech does not necessarily indicate a phonological problem rather than a motoric problem. Many patterns can have either linguistic or motoric bases. For example, a child may consistently reduce consonant clusters either because of lack of understanding of the phonological rule or because of a motoric inability to sequence consonants.
