Treatments

Childhood Apraxia of Speech (CAS) is a deficit in motor planning, or the ability to purposefully move the muscles of the mouth to produce words. CAS is not an articulation disorder. A child may be able to produce the individual sounds of a word, but will have difficulty connecting them together to clearly say the word as a whole.

There are over 100 muscles that are used to produce sounds for speech. Moving these muscles of the mouth and face from one sound to the next is where the breakdown occurs. So combining a bunch of sounds together into words and sentences is quite a challenge for children with apraxia.

Although there are characteristics that articulation delays and CAS share, CAS has specific characteristics that characterize this difficulty with motor planning and programming movement for speech. Its presentation can look very similar to articulation delay, but the characteristics of CAS are likely to continue past the typical developmental speech period.

Treatment for Childhood Apraxia of Speech also differs from articulation therapy because effective treatment for CAS requires a more intensive approach. Smiling Star Speech & Language is proud to be PROMPT-trained facility, which is a system that been very effective in providing more input to the mouth muscles to facilitate movement from one sound to the next.