Childhood Apraxia Of Speech Analysis

There are a number of steps that we, as speech pathologists, must take to diagnosis Childhood Apraxia of Speech (CAS). As with any diagnosis we make, we must complete a full evaluation, looking across all aspects that may affect your child’s speech. This includes interviewing the child’s caregivers (you), taking a look in your child’s mouth, testing their hearing, and assessing their speech and language strengths and difficulties. Another test we have children complete to help us be more positive in our diagnosis of CAS in a motor speech assessment.
At the beginning of the evaluation, we will ask you some questions about your pregnancy, your child’s birth and when your child met developmental and speech milestones. Learning about your child’s
During these tests, we will be looking for the three key features of CAS: inconsistent consonant and vowel errors, difficulty transitioning between sounds in words and phrases, and inappropriate use of stress. These features make us more certain in our diagnosis of CAS. The DEMSS is a dynamic assessment, which means that we will test you child at multiple levels of difficulty and provide help when they need it. We will start with shorter words, like “me” and “hi,” and move to short phrases, like “how are you?” Each word and phrase will be presented twice to see if your child makes the same errors or different errors each time they say it. With each word we present your child, we will also give your child different levels of support to help them succeed, such as having them watch our face and imitate us. The SRT looks at your child’s ability to repeat made up words that are 1-4 syllables in length. Again, we are looking to see if they can correctly repeat each sound in the word or if they add any extra sounds. If we notice that your child frequently adds extra sounds to the made-up words we present, it is more likely that your child has
This is important in differentially diagnosing CAS instead of an articulation or phonological disorder. Children with speech sound or phonological disorders make the same errors consistently, while children with CAS will not demonstrate these consistent patterns. Although language is not usually the main area of concern in a CAS evaluation, it is still important to test your child’s language abilities to make certain there are no co-occurring language difficulties. Also, children with CAS tend to have more difficultly producing language (expressive) than understanding (receptive) language, and this shows in testing results. Lastly, we will collect a sample of your child talking while playing or interacting normally. This will allow us to look at the speech sounds they can produce, their intelligibility, the types of words they can produce (short and long) and your child’s social skills. It is also nice to compare your child’s speech from the sample to the results we got during formal testing to make sure that our results reflect your child’s performance in real life. After performing these tasks, we will hopefully have all the information we need to make a positive and certain diagnosis of