Excerpts taken from Childhood Apraxia of Speech: Practical Strategies for Successful Treatment presentation by Margaret A. Fish, MS CCC-SLP
Childhood Apraxia of Speech or CAS can be defined as a childhood disorder in which the ability to produce consistent and accurate mouth movements for speech is impaired, when other neurological/muscular deficits are not present. The primary impairment is the ability to plan and execute complex sequences of movement required for understandable speech.
Children with CAS require intensive, frequent speech therapy sessions to improve their ability to coordinate motor movements required for speaking. Some early red flags for CAS include:
No sensory deficits, muscle weakness, or other neuromuscular impairment- Child understands more words/sentences than what he/she uses
- Late in attaining first words- usually after age 2
- Limited number of consonants and vowels in spoken words
- Limited babbling or talking
- Tendency to produce single consonants and vowels, rather than longer words or phrases
- More frequent loss of previously produced words
- Use of signs/gestures for functional communication, rather than using words
- Child’s speech is largely unintelligible, especially to strangers
If you are concerned about your child’s ability to make understandable speech, here are a few guidelines for speech sound development:
- By age 2, parents (or close family members) should understand 75-80% of what their child says. The child’s speech will not sound adult-like.
- By age 3, parents and strangers should understand about 75-80% of what the child says.
- By age 4, the child should be able to produce long sentences and tell short stories about their day. They should be understandable all the time, but will likely have trouble producing some speech sounds like ‘r, th, v, l.’
- By age 8, all speech sounds should be correctly produced in conversational speech.
DeeAnna Cook, MS CCC-SLP
Clinic Therapist TherapyWorks