Developmental Speech Treatment Services by Sally Bober & Associates Texas | Speech Apraxia Oral Motor Therapy
Developmental Apraxia
Developmental apraxia (dyspraxia) of speech is the inability to plan and execute nonhabitual motor-speech tasks. It is the inability to coordinate the oral movements necessary to produce and combine phonemes to form syllables and words in the absence of oral paresis or paralysis as a primary impairment.
Children who are likely to exhibit developmental dyspraxia of speech include:
- The infant who exhibits little cooing or babbling, with first words occurring after l8 months of age.
- The two year old who is non-verbal, or who continues to use non-speech sounds or vocalizations without any word approximations.
- The two year old who resorts to gestures only, rather than attempting word approximations.
- The child who is able to produce many phonemes in isolation but has difficulty maintaining any sound combinations.
- The child who "blurts" words or phrases but is unable to repeat them on command.
- The child who is able to say many single words clearly, but becomes unintelligible in phrases or sentences beyond the age of three.
- The child who continues to reduce the number of syllables in simple words beyond the age of three.
- The child who deletes phonemes from words beyond the age of three.
- The child who has difficulty making simple movements of the tongue, lips, or palate or appears not to move his/her speech articulators in a normal way.
- The child who appears to be generally clumsy in his/her motor skills and is also having trouble with speech. (Kaufman Speech Praxis Test for Children manual)
Children with apraxia of speech are often mistakenly diagnosed as having an articulatory disorder (errors of phoneme production only), a phonological impairment (underlying difficulty understanding the rules of the sound system), or dysarthria (oral-muscular weakness). At Sally Bober & Associates, our speech therapists are trained in various methods that allow our clients to be successful with expressive communication.
PROMPT SYSTEM
The PROMPT SYSTEM (Prompts for Restructuring Oral Muscular Phonetic Targets) is a system which uses tactile cues of pressure, place and timing to promote and enhance effective neuro-muscular innervations and coordination for the learning and integration of motor-speech behaviors.
Sally Bober and her team have been trained in this exciting program that allows them to evaluate all parts of the child's motor-speech system which gives great insight into the nature of the difficulties.
Children diagnosed with apraxia of speech struggle to perform even the simplest oral motor movements. Accessing the tactile-sensory information applied externally through the PROMPT SYSTEM enables new and more intact neuro-motor pathways to be created. Our clinic is constantly looking for new and effective ways to assist our clients that are non-verbal, low verbal or who have a severe articulation disorder.
The PROMPT SYSTEM has been a successful addition to our already established oral motor/expressive protocol.