Childhood Apraxia Of Speech (CAS)

Childhood apraxia of speech, also known as CAS, is a motor speech disorder. The disorder is a result of miscommunication between the signals of the brain and parts of the mouth and jaw. The jaw, lips, tongue, and other parts of the mouth do not move normally when producing words. For example, children with CAS may not be able to pronounce every syllable structure process in a word. For example, the word tomato may be pronounced as mato, or toma. In such cases, children may drop the first or the last syllable of a word. However, they won’t be consistent with types of deletions. Parents or teachers may notice various problems with speech because children with CAS do not have just one speech disorder. Rather, they will have multiple disorders
As a result, the brain does not not tell an affected child’s lips, jaw, tongue, or other body parts used in speech how to move correctly (Jacks, Marquardt, & Davis, 2005; Grigos, Moss, & Lu, 2013; Highman, Hennessey, Leitão, & Piek, 2013). Therefore, the child has a number of problems pronouncing sounds and syllables. Syllable deletion and initial and final consonant deletion are all primary symptoms of CAS. Such deletions are more prevalent in children with CAS than with any other speech disorders children may have. Syllable problems include issues with deleting certain syllables in words as in the following example: potato is pronounced tado. Also, more than with any other disorder, an initial and final consonant is deleted: boat becomes oat or bo (Jacks, Marquardt, & Davis,
This disorder is highly complicated and is caused by errors in motor processing. According to ASHA, therapy is very difficult due to difficulty with diagnosis: symptoms of CAS may vary with each child, so progress in therapy takes longer to achieve. The clinician must assess each articulator—lips, jaw, tongue, etc.—in order figure out the fundamental speech production. When a child’s speech errors are extremely variable and inconsistent, the clinician can then diagnose a child with CAS. The child may exhibit problems with speech that include difficulty with the number of sound inventories, production of sound sequences, commission of vowel errors, imitation of speech, ease with prosody, and struggling with the formation of articulators to produce the correct sound (Grigos & Kolenda, 2009). Other symptoms of this disorder may include deficiencies in speech perception and with expressive language and phonological awareness. A child may also experience problems with literacy-related skills. The root of this disorder is located in the brain centers that are involved in planning and programming of speech motor performance. Some of the symptoms of CAS remain longer than in other children with speech disorders or delays. While the vocabulary size and speech skill are not directly related to each other in these children, it could still be due to their intelligibility in their speech (Velleman,