Essay on Childhood Apraxia of Speech

There, I had the privilege of seeing an Early-Intervention Speech Therapist work with one of my students. She would sit on the floor and play games with him. Through these games, she was able to elicit verbalization from this child who normally grunted to communicate. Over a course of a year, I witnessed his communication skills enhance little-by-little with the assistance of this therapist. I had not realized how much he had improved until I saw him interacting with his friends at the dress-up center. This little boy who would once play alone on the floor was now requesting different objects and laughing with his friends. Recollecting his progress was phenomenal. Inspired by what I saw, I researched more about the field. While doing so, my mother disclosed to me that she and her father had an articulation disorder. Although my grandfather did not receive services, my mother received therapy in school, which she recalls as an unpleasant experience. Taking into account all that I witnessed and learned about the subject, I realized that I had found the middle ground between teacher and therapist that I had been searching for in Speech-Language Pathology.

The participants consisted of 43 preschoolers with verbalization and sound disorders between the ages of four and five. The participants were selected through clinical recommendations in upstate New York from May 2007 to April 2008. Children were primarily from middle

Speech, language and communication difficulties can have a profound and lasting effect on children’s lives and development. These can affect their ability to communicate and interact with others. The impact of these difficulties will vary depending on the severity of the problems, the support they receive, the demands of the child’s environment

One of the adults I worked with was Ben. Ben has severe apraxia, started speaking around the age of seven, and he is 23 years old. Some of the different exercises Ben did while I was there were matching with flash cards, he was given a pile of flashcards with labels on them and correlating pictures were spread out in front of him and he was asked to find the weights, so he had to find the picture which had the weights on it and so on. He also did an expressive drill for articulation. I noticed when he said one of his words ‘inventory’ he added an “a” at the end of it so it would be ‘inventorya’. The next thing Ben did was read books made by his Speech Language Pathologist from an app called Pictello. These books were made for him and they told about each of his jobs and what he did at those jobs. Ben has many jobs currently and has had a few different jobs in the past also. He works at the high school he attended and that is where I got to observe Ben also. Some of his jobs at the school include: washing

Neurological systems were also evaluated to identify any existing health or comorbidities promptly and to utilize interventions such as referral to neurologists, ophthalmologists, or speech pathologists if necessary. Developmental red flags, in this case, would include the inability to understand the use of action words and being unable to follow two-step direction (Bellman et al., 2013). This would be indicative of receptive language delay. Expressive language delays are characterized by a child’s inability to ask for things by name, use no less than 200 words, or repeat phrases in response to questions (Stevenson & Richman, 2016). However, none of these red flags was reported by the child’s

Auditory Processing Disorder (APD), also known as central auditory processing disorder (CAPD), is a neurological defect that affects how the brain processes spoken language. It affects about 5% of school-aged children making it difficult for the child to process verbal instructions or to cancel out background noise in the classroom. A child who has Auditory Processing Disorder may have the same kind of behavioral problems as a child who has ADD, and also might be confused with Autism, Asperger’s, Language processing disorder, and Dyslexia. For children who suffer from APD, the understanding of meanings, sound combination, and the categorical order of words are mistaken.

Those students are always in for a long road of speech therapy as well as, problems with reading. I am interested in new research in the area because these students are typically of average intelligence but struggle in school immensely because of their disorder. According to the webinar on Childhood Apraxia of Speech, CAS is defined as a neurological childhood speech sound disorder in which the precision and consistency of movements underlying speech are impaired. The main features of the disorder consist of inconsistent errors lengthened, disrupted coarticulatory transitions, and inappropriate prosody. Motor performance is the generalization of learned behaviors while motor learning is the retention or generalization of learned behaviors. Motor learning is the problem that children with CAS encounter. Phonological awareness is important for students with CAS because they have difficulty with reading and spelling. The training of sounds can be done while also training speech sound production. A new therapy technique for CAS is using ultrasound biofeedback to establish a motor skill at the syllable or word level. The benefits of ultrasound are that the student can visually see the elevation of the tongue or retraction on hard to form sounds such as /r/. The disadvantage is that most clinicians do not have access to ultrasound at a reasonable cost to

Children with APD have trouble processing the sounds heard into letters and words. Many children may hear fewer words which were really spoken, giving them the impression that the sounds heard are foreign and unfamiliar. On the other hand, some children with APD may actually hear the words being said however they can’t connect the words to their meaning. Children with APD develop a second nature to lip read and follow facial cues to compensate for their lack of understanding spoken language. Yet when speaking on the telephone these factors are not present, creating a difficult task for children with this disability.

Students with speech and language impairment are often in general or regular classrooms. To help students with this type of disorders early intervention is way to address this communication problem. Children who are often classify, as high risk are those with chronic ear infection, genetic defects, alcohol syndrome, neurological defects or delayed language. Those who treat this disorders are called speech language pathologist and they could treat as young as 3. Around the age of two most children say around 50 or more words. At the age of there are very chatty and can begin to put sentences together. Also at three they begin to discover that different words having meaning. When the child is delay or one of the components of communication is disrupted the child is at risk for a language

We need to expand the Apraxia bubble to the parents who aren't affected by it, to the teachers who know nothing about it, and to the speech professionals who somehow do not know about it. The rewards alone in connecting the Apraxia community to the non-Apraxia community are incredible and slowly, but surely it CAN be done.

Many different studies looking at the emergence of language in the ASD population compared to typically developing children show that there is a

Developmental verbal dyspraxia (DVD) is a learning disability that affects the physical co-ordination of a child because the brain is unable to process information in order to convey neural messages at full transmission (Eckersley, 2004). Dyspraxia is also known as childhood apraxia of speech and is defined as “the inability to utilize voluntary motor abilities effectively in all aspects of life from play to structure skilled tasks (Bowens, Smith, 1999). This disability often occurs in childhood and progresses to adulthood. Although it is not curable, treatment plans have been developed over the years in order to improve the way a child is able to communicate and comprehend reading material.

Speech and language delays can be problematic for preschoolers, school aged children and adolescents. These delays range in degree of severity and have many causes; physical and developmentally. Communication plays a specific and important role to all people, especially, preschool children who are developing speech and language skills at fast rate. The consequences of these delays can be devastating for the children affected and can follow them into adulthood. These effects may include academic problems, social and emotional issues and may even lead into mental illness. Children with speech and language delays need professional intervention as young as possible. However even with intervention, some children are still at risk of suffering

A child with autistic traits very often show signs of language development delay, this normally is

Individuals with autism generally demonstrate delayed or deviant verbal and non-verbal communication. In fact, poor communication skills are found in nearly all autistic children, and some autistic individuals never acquire functional speech. Those who do acquire speech often have pragmatic difficulties with the language, and are generally unable to use it in a socially communicative fashion. They may display abnormalities in the volume, stress, rate, rhythm, and intonation of their speech. Bizarre uses of language are also common. For example, ecolalia (repeating heard words or phrases), and palelalia (repeating oneself), are often seen in autism. In addition, disturbances in responses to sensory stimuli (particularly hypersensitive hearing or hyperacusis) are also common in autism.