A Systematic Approach to Viewing and Treating Apraxia of Speech: Part One- Overview of the Approach

Part One: Overview of the Approach

The Systematic Approach for treating apraxia of speech is focused on 6 main points:

1.  Children with apraxia of speech are missing their speech maps.  They must rely simply on muscle memory to remember and repeat speech movements.

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2.  Therapy may only need to target movement patterns (2 pure speech sounds with the movement in-between) which may generalize to all words, phrases, sentences, etc.

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3.  You need to use a sustained phonatory model to teach the movement between two pure speech sounds. 

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 4.  You need to consider which sounds are easier to produce with sustained phonation when choosing therapy targets.

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 5.  Don’t forget to target ALL possible movement patterns, specifically all consonant-consonant movement patterns – as these often get overlooked.  Targeting all movement patterns will help speech connect from one word to the next and will make it sound fluid and natural and will aid in prosody control.

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 6.  Each therapy session should consist of a drill portion and a play portion.  The drill portion should focus on perfecting the production of specific sounds (i.e. /m/) in specific movement patterns (i.e. consonant-consonant).  The play portion should focus on using some or all of the specific sounds or movement patterns targeted in a functional way (i.e. words, phrases, sentences, etc.).

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Have questions about this systematic approach???  

FOLLOW ME along my 7 post journey which will describe my approach in great detail along with my thinking process, trial runs and research on individual apraxia clients, progress and success of these clients, and more.  Remember to add comments and thoughts so that we can work together to conquer apraxia of speech!!!

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