Observations on speech characteristics associated with Childhood Apraxia of Speech in a dynamic motor speech assessment

The assessment of a child’s speech problem needs to incorporate several tasks and sampling methods to identify the difficulties appointing the speech production level/s involved. This study aimed to investigate the contribution from two tasks: a dynamic motor speech test and a single word phoneme test in observing speech characteristics consistent with deficits of speech motor planning. The participants were 28 children between three and nine years old diagnosed with Childhood Apraxia of speech (CAS). Speech samples from the two tests for each child were used for perceptual identification of speech characteristics. The results showed that behaviors associated with CAS (i.e., deviant articulatory transitions and articulatory groping) were evident in more children in the dynamic test sample than the naming test sample. This indicates that dynamic assessment is adding information on discriminative speech characteristics of CAS, supporting earlier research suggesting a dynamic test to be part of the assessment procedure.