Childhood Apraxia of Speech
Speech requires communication between the brain and mouth.
For children with apraxia of speech, coordination of the brain and muscles in the mouth is lacking, distorting standard speech patterns.
This lack of proper signaling makes it very hard for your child to create simple mouth movements required for everyday speech.
Children with apraxia of speech are challenging to understand, and nothing seems to be helping.
Unfortunately, children with apraxia don’t grow out of it. They need help from a speech therapist, and seeking help should occur early.
What are the symptoms of apraxia?
The most recognizable symptoms of apraxia are:
- Difficulty stringing syllables together in correct order to make words
- Difficulty saying long or complex words
- Repeated attempts at pronunciation of words
- Sometimes a child can say a word but other times they can’t
- Incorrect inflection or stress on specific words
- Omitting consonants at the beginnings and ends of words
These are all things we can work on in speech therapy – but starting soon gives us more hope of helping your child.
You are not alone – I am here to help.
Our work begins with an evaluation that allows us to look at your child’s oral-motor skills, how the jaw, lips, and tongue work together, speech melody (intonation), and how they say different sounds.
In this evaluation, we also will assess how your child says single speech sounds along with sounds plus words and how well others can understand what your child says.
Our evaluation goal is to determine what your child needs most and where the breakdown occurs. I will make therapy fun and individualized to your child and their needs.
I have training in PROMPT (Restructuring Oral Muscular Phonetic Targets), which is one of many approaches I enjoy using to help guide the child to make the right movements during speech.
Our journey will take time.
Our goal is to help your child make movements in a manner that results in the right sounds. This type of treatment takes time and requires working with a speech therapist.
As your child’s speech therapist, I will be there every step of the way and make this experience as positive, fun, and effective as possible, so you and your child can reach each goal to ensure they are as successful as possible.
I’m in it for the long haul because I am passionate about helping children with apraxia and have a heart for children struggling with their speech.
With a lot of work, your child’s speech can improve. Connect with me now!