Understanding Childhood Apraxia of Speech (CAS)

So let's talk a bit about childhood apraxia of speech.

Can you explain to our listeners what it is and why? Yeah, maybe a little bit of like how it might present or something like that.

Yeah.

So childhood apraxia of speech is a rare motor speech disorder.

So I think it's one to two children per 1000 is the statistic.

So I guess across your clinical journey, you might only see a handful of children with CAS.

So it usually starts in early childhood, but it can progress into adulthood.

Children with CAS, they usually know what they want to say, but their brain has difficulty coordinating and planning the movements of, say, the lips, tongue, jaw, everything that's needed for clear speech.

And as a result, they can have trouble producing sounds, syllables and words.

accurately and consistently is probably the main thing.

And it can often look like other speech sound disorders at the start and it can take a little while of seeing a child before you might start to think maybe it's CAS, or childhood apraxia of speech, because they might have other sound errors or unclear speech.

So common things that it can be confused with might be an articulation difficulty, Well, it's very different, sorry.

So that might be something like a lisp or trouble with our sounds or something like that.

But the class of sounds affected is usually not very many.

Or there's phonological based errors where there's like patterns to what the child's doing with their sounds.

G might always be produced as d.

So go is do, girl is derl.

So very different, both very different from CAS in that the difficulty is not in the mode of planning.

And then there's also something called dysarthria, which is caused by a weakness or poor control of the speech muscles.

So they might not move as fast or far or strongly enough.

So that can sound like slurred speech, slow speech, like soft horse or strained, and usually easier to distinguish from CAS, but they can kind of overlap because there's the coordination areas of the brain that are affected.

So I guess really important to see a speech pathologist because they'll be able to be differentiating between whether they think it's something more common, like an articulation difficulty or a phonological disorder versus something like CAS.

Yeah.

And I think like what you said before about an articulation or a phonological error, they're often consistent in the mispronunciation.

So like you said, like go would be do or girl would be do, but it would always be like that.