Childhood Disabilities & Disorders
- When to Seek Therapy
- Disabilities & Disorders
- ADHD/ADD
- Anxiety Disorders
- Apraxia of Speech, Childhood
- Articulation Disorders
- Asperger's Syndrome
- Autism Spectrum Disorder
- Birth Injuries
- Central Auditory Processing Disorder
- Cerebral Palsy
- Clubfoot
- Conduct Disorder
- Down Syndrome
- Elimination disorders (enuresis and encopresis)
- Failure to thrive/feeding disorder
- Fine and Gross Motor Delays
- Fluency/Stuttering
- Fracture
- Fragile X Syndrome
- Gait abnormalities
- Global Developmental Delay
- Hip dysplasia
- Language Delays
- Learning Disabilities
- Legg-Calve-Perthes Disease
- Mental Retardation
- Mood Disorders
- Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD)
- Oral Motor Disorders
- Orthopedic conditions
- Osgood-Schlatter Disease
- Pervasive Developmental Disorder
- Pica
- Reactive attachment disorder of infancy or early childhood
- Reading Disorders
- Scoliosis
- Selective Mutism
- Sensory Processing Disorder
- Separation anxiety disorder
- Tic disorders
- Torticollis (Wry Neck)
- Additional Resources
Apraxia of Speech, Childhood
Childhood Apraxia of Speech (CAS) is a neurodevelopmental motor speech disorder. CAS is associated with the impaired production of sounds, syllables and words as a result of the difficulty coordinating the positioning of the articulators (face, jaw, lips and tongue). These difficulties do not arise from the muscles themselves, but from impairments in planning the movement of the muscles (motor planning). As a result, a child will know what he wants to say and will have the muscle capability to do so, however will have difficulty planning his/her articulatory movements to produce the sound, syllables and words accurately.
Common signs of CAS include increased difficulty with longer words and utterances as compared to shorter ones (e.g. the child can say “ice” but not “ice cream” or “I want ice cream”) and inconsistent error patterns (i.e. making a different pronunciation error each time the same word is attempted). A child with CAS may be able to say a word perfectly at one time, and unable to produce it at all on the next attempt.
CAS is also known as Developmental Apraxia of Speech (DAS) and/or Developmental Verbal Dyspraxia (DVD).
