A Parents Guide to Apraxia – Speech & OT speechandot.com

Childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) can be a startling issue to confront at first. Everyone’s brain develops a muscle plan for the mouth, jaw, and tongue as they are learning to speak the language(s) they are raised around. In contrast to other speech impediments, the ability for the brain to perform this task isn’t weak but rather confused – there is an overall difficulty in coordinating the shapes and movements required to make the sounds. This can cause a distortion in how they pronounce vowels and consonants, distinct separations between syllables (within a single word or an entire sentence), or confusing similar sounding words, such as saying ‘batch’ instead of ‘patch’. This, however, is only a base line of examples, and can be confused with other language problems.