SPEECH-SOUND ERRORS:
APRAXIA & PHONOLOGICAL DEFICITS:
What is Apraxia?
Apraxia (otherwise known as Childhood Apraxia of Speech — CAS) is a motor planning deficit, specifically with producing speech, that makes it difficult to understand a child’s speech. The child is unable to coordinate the complex movements required for the mouth to form each sound as well as the movements between sounds to produce words, sentences, and phrases.What are the signs of apraxia?
The child attempts to communicate; however, his/her speech is very difficult to understand and he/she appears to have extreme difficulty sequencing between speech sounds. An example of this is a child who might only produce a consonant as an approximation for a word (e.g., “p” for “please” or “t” for “want”).What are Phonological Deficits?
Phonological deficits are characterized as errors in patterns of sounds. A child’s sound errors can include patterns such as consonant cluster reduction (e.g., deleting the “s” from “star”), substitutions (e.g., pronouncing “cup” as “tup”), and syllable deletions (e.g., pronouncing “bubble” as “buh”).What are the signs of phonological deficits?
The child communicates; however, his/her speech is difficult to understand. Frequently, these children are not aware that they are making any speech errors.What causes speech sound deficits?
Some speech sound deficits are a result of a phonological processing problem, where a child is not hearing the speech sounds he/she is producing and recognizing the difference between his/her own speech and the speech of others around him/her.Speech sound deficits can also be the result of oral-motor weakness or coordination problems where a child is unable to move his/her mouth to shape his/her articulators to produce speech sounds accurately.