“Tan I have a tup?”, “I want some tandy?”, “Tome here.” Sound familiar??? This is called “velar fronting”. These errors occur when a child substitutes a sound produced in the back of the mouth (k/g) with a sound produced in the front of the mouth (t/d). This is a very common problem that is treated […]
1. Kids with Apraxia really NEED my help We are not talking about taking a slight frontal /s/ distortion and making it sound perfect. We are talking about kids who have little to no means of communication. They have extreme difficulty expressing their wants and needs. Such limited verbal communication can cause a chain reaction […]
Part Seven: Keeping it Functional Throughout my posts I have demonstrated a simple and systematic way to view and treat apraxia of speech. One of the main points of this approach is that you only need to focus on practicing movement patterns and they will generalize to words, phrase, sentences, and ultimately conversational speech. This […]
Part Six: A Plug-in for Prosody One of the biggest complaints about kiddos with apraxia is that they sound a little like a computer. Most therapists attribute the computer like voice to a prosody deficit. Prosody – simply defined is when we use stress, inflection, and varied length/rate of speech while communicating. Most kids with […]
Part Five: Choosing Therapy Targets: When I originally began working with apraxic children I often chose therapy targets based on which sounds were easier to produce in isolation. I then targeted those sounds in a variety of syllable shapes based on the research I had done on other apraxia approaches. But I quickly learned that […]
Part Four: The Sustained Phonatory Modeling Technique So based on the theory I have presented (The Movement Pattern Generalization Theory) we may only need to focus therapy on a movement pattern basis (2 pure speech sounds with the movement in-between). This theory is great – but I am sure all of the therapists out there […]
Part Three: The Movement Pattern Generalization Theory Have I ever mentioned how much I love working with children with Apraxia??? It fills me with a great amount of passion – the kind of passion that leaves me sitting awake quietly at night thinking, pondering, and praying for inspiration and guidance about how to treat it […]
Part Two: What is Apraxia??? Imagine you are driving to a familiar place. A place that you have driven to many times before. Maybe your work or your school. Someplace that you drive to often. Now – think about how much thought you put into your trip to get there. It is surprising how little […]
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. 2. Therapy may only need to target movement patterns (2 pure […]
There I was, sitting in a speech session in the middle of the week. It was a monotonous day, one that looked a lot like the few days/weeks/months before it. But then something happened, and it hit me like a ton of bricks. Tears began to fill my eyes and I literally had to stop […]
