Apraxia of Speech

Meredith is "Apraxia Kids" recognized for Advanced Training & Expertise in Childhood Apraxia of Speech

 

Meredith endeavors to provide the best Childhood Apraxia of Speech (CAS) interventions available by attending the National Conference on CAS and by constantly researching and studying evidence based practices, methods and interventions. CAS is a speech disorder of motor planning that can exist in absence of any neurological cause or origin. The core impairment is motor planning and creating and executing motor sequences with appropriate prosody and lexical stress. Because CAS is a motor execution disorder, Meredith treats CAS according to principles of motor learning (PML) and with emphasis on early literacy.

Warning Signs for CAS:

  • Has few words (less than 5) at 15 months or older

  • Uses only vowel sounds, grunts, or single syllables to communicate at 15 months or older

  • May not have cooed or babbled as an infant

  • Makes more errors on longer words or sentences than with single  sounds or syllables

  • Has difficulty imitating speech, but imitated speech is more clear than spontaneous speech

  • Sounds choppy, monotonous, or stresses the wrong syllable or word

  • Can understand language much better than he or she can         produce through speech

  • May struggle when trying to move their mouth into the right position to make a sound

  • Is hard to understand, especially for an unfamiliar listener

  • May have problems when learning to read, spell, and write


Treatment Approaches and Strategies:

  • “Apraxia Kids” Sanctioned Best Practices for CAS

  • Dynamic Temporal and Tactile Cueing (DTTC)

  • Prompts for Restructuring Oral Muscular Phonetic Targets (PROMPT)

  • Kaufman Speech to Language Protocol

  • ReST: Rapid Syllables Transition Treatment

  • Integration of principles of motor learning (PML)

  • Touch/Gestural Cues/ Hand signals: Multisensory Cueing

  • Backward chaining

  • Pacing / Prosody / Intonation

  • Use of AAC

  • Phonic Faces

  • Early Literacy

 

Meredith Apraxia News:

*** GOSSLP, the organization that provides learning opportunities for speech pathologists based out of Metro Atlanta school systems, invited Meredith to present on Apraxia of Speech at their Fall 2020 Conference.

*** TACA (The Autism Community in Action) has invited Meredith to speak about apraxia and autism at their East Coast Conference in Atlanta on March 13, 2020. She has been reinvited to present in 2021. www.tacanow.org/conference/east-coast/

*** Georgia State University’s graduate program for speech pathology re-invited Meredith to serve as a guest lecturer on the topic of pediatric motor speech disorders (apraxia & dysarthria), April 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022.

*** Due to strong support of the nonprofit organization, Apraxia Kids, Meredith served as Walk Coordinator for the Atlanta Walk for Apraxia 2016, 2019

*** Atlanta Public Schools invited Meredith to provide a 3-hour inservice discussing Childhood Apraxia for their SLPs, October 8, 2018.

Here is a link to an article Meredith wrote about apraxia published in Autism Advocate Parent Magazine: https://bit.ly/3Tzosb