Apraxia of Speech

Imagine if you knew the words you wanted to say but when you put out the effort to say them the words became intelligible?  Frustrating!  Imagine trying to understand and translate for someone whose words were missing? Frustrating!  But that is every day in a family who have loved ones with Verbal Apraxia.

Apraxia (CAS) is a specific speech disorder in which a child has difficulty planning specific movements with their jaw, palate, lips and tongue in order to create speech.  The brain does not tell the muscles to perform in the right sequence and therefore words become intelligible.

My Daughter was diagnosed with Apraxia when she was a little over 3 years old.  When she was 2 she was diagnosed with ELD (Expressive Language Disorder) but did not qualify for speech services.  When she turned 3 we took her to be evaluated by the public school district.  At this point any words that she had used in the past she had dropped and no longer could say.  She was considered non-verbal.

My Daughter started working with a school district assigned SLP (speech and language pathologist) with the assumption that she had ELD.  The SLP evaluated her in several categories and learned that her vocabulary was above normal expectations for her age and she was able to used that vocabulary properly.  This ruled out ELD as a possible diagnosis.  My daughter showed no signs of any other speech related delay so the SLP started working with her through a phonic approach.

After several months of this approach my daughter showed no improvement and in some cases had actually dropped sounds that she had previously mastered.  Her SLP decided to take another route.  She decided to work with Praxis Cards.  Praxis means "planned movement".  These cards broke down words with wrong sounds that moved into right sounds.  A progression of sounds that lead to the right words.  She did well with Praxis cards but there was a continuous loss of progression or addition of sounds that were not in the words - such as an "a" at the beginning or end of a word.  My daughters SLP was able to diagnose her with Verbal Apraxia through her observances of the inaccuracies of my daughters speech.

Now that we had a diagnosis we knew that there would be more issues to come.  Soon my daughter started to show signs that a sensory issue existed - signs that when she was younger we thought was "just her age".  Such as not wanting to eat certain foods.  Being on the "white diet".  Now at 4 she still eats hardly anything.  She does not like certain textures - she will tell you that colored foods "feel silly".  She also can not handle foods that are warm or hot.  She does ok with cold things like ice cream and popsicles but her dinners meals we have to bring to room temperature before she will eat it - no hot temp - not even luke warm.  She also confuses hot/cold and hearing/smelling/tasting.  For instance she will cover her ears if something doesn't look right or cover her mouth if something is too loud.

So our journey with Apraxia begins.


find out more about Apraxia @ Apraxia-KIDS

A few specific Links:
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