Frequently Asked Questions from Parents of Children Recently Diagnosed with Apraxia of Speech

Apraxia of Speech is considered a motor speech disorder. For unknown reasons, children with apraxia have great difficulty planning and producing the precise, highly refined and specific series of movements of the tongue, lips, jaw and palate that are necessary for intelligible speech. Apraxia of speech may also be called verbal apraxia, developmental apraxia of speech, or verbal dyspraxia. No matter what it is called the most important concept is the root word “praxis.” Praxis means planned movement. So to some degree or another, a child with the diagnosis of apraxia of speech has difficulty programming and planning speech movements. Apraxia of speech is a specific speech disorder.

A true developmental delay of speech is when the child is following the “typical” path of childhood speech development, albeit at a rate slower than normal. Sometimes this rate is commensurate with cognitive skills. In typical speech/language development, the child’s receptive and expressive skills are pretty much moving together. What is generally seen in a child with apraxia of speech is a significant gap between their receptive language abilities and expressive abilities. In other words, the child’s ability to understand language (receptive ability) is broadly within normal limits, but his or her expressive speech is seriously deficient, absent, or severely unclear. This is an important factor and one indicator that the child may be experiencing more than “delayed” speech and should be evaluated for the presence of a specific speech disorder such as apraxia. However, certain language disorders may also cause a similar pattern in a child. A gap between a child’s expressive and receptive language ability is insufficient to diagnose apraxia.

What causes apraxia?

Apraxia of speech is felt to be a neurogenic (neurologically based) speech motor disorder. Many (or perhaps most) children with apraxia of speech have no abnormalities as detected by MRI scans. Others may have specific damage to a part of the brain that can account for the problem. In the latter case, some children are born with such damage and other children acquire damage to the brain by accident or illness. In the last five years there has been significant interest by researchers in the role that genetics may play in childhood apraxia of speech. Some researchers believe that it is likely apraxia is not caused by any one factor and that there may be different subtypes of CAS based on the particular underlying cause. Currently, research is continuing on the underlying causes of Childhood Apraxia of Speech.

Will my child ever be able to speak “normally”?

With appropriate therapy (see above) and a lot of follow-through by parents and others, many children with apraxia of speech can become effective verbal communicators. Will speech ever be entirely “normal”? We can report that we know of children who ultimately become good speakers and their “problem” is not detectable to nonprofessionals. In other children, lingering articulation issues follow them. Childhood Apraxia of speech is a serious and challenging speech disorder. A lot of hard work on the part of therapist, parents, and child needs to occur. We can honestly say, however, that as parents use the Apraxia-Kids network to report on the successes and accomplishments of their children, we hear many reasons to hope for the best.