You’ve been waiting to communicate more with your child and to learn how they view the world. Unfortunately, you’ve run into some challenges with your child's communication, and you want to figure out why.
Well, there are many issues that can affect a child’s speech and language development, and childhood apraxia of speech is an uncommon one — it affects only about 1-2 kids out of every 1,000.
To determine whether your child might be affected by childhood apraxia of speech, we turn to the team of speech therapy experts at Celebrations Speech Group. In the following, we review some of the more common signs of childhood apraxia of speech and what steps you should take next.
Very briefly, childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) is classified as a motor speech disorder because it involves both neurological and mechanical mechanisms.
When you speak, your brain knows what it wants to say and then sends the signals to the muscles around your mouth to form those words. With CAS, kids can struggle with the brain-to-mouth connection and fail to execute the correct movement sequences for clear speech.
In other words, kids with CAS know what they want to say, so it’s not a developmental delay. Instead, they have issues with the execution of speech because the nerve pathways between their brain and their mouth aren’t functioning correctly.
One of the challenges with identifying speech disorders in kids is that it can be difficult to separate simple and temporary speech issues from a clinical disorder. For example, many kids go through stages of mispronouncing words or using them incorrectly when they first learn to speak.
As a result, most cases of CAS are best diagnosed after age 3, when kids really start to communicate more earnestly. At this point, kids should be talking and pronouncing with more ease; if they’re not, we can start to explore whether there’s an issue.
In the case of CAS, warning signs to watch out for include:
While each of these side effects of CAS can be found in other developmental and speech disorders, one unique aspect of CAS is that it’s often accompanied by issues with eating. This makes sense given that CAS is a motor issue, and the same neural pathway can affect all mouth functions, including chewing and swallowing.
Given the complexity of childhood apraxia of speech, it’s really important that you seek the right diagnosis and help. More specifically, we urge you to check in with us since we’ve devoted our practice to speech and communication issues in kids.
Our speech therapists and pediatric speech pathologists understand the nuances in communication development, and we can more easily identify challenging conditions like childhood apraxia of speech.
To schedule a comprehensive evaluation with one of our CAS specialists, contact one of our offices in Brentwood, Stockton, or Elk Grove, California.
