Apraxia of speech (AOS) Flashcards
Definition of apraxia?
“Acquired disorder of learned volitional actions associated with breakdown in the planning or programming needed for speech”
Who wrote the definition?
Miller and Waumbaugh, 2021
What is AOS also known as?
Verbal apraxia / dyspraxia
What is AOS not attributable to?
Deficits in strength/tone/reflexes (dysarthria), deficits in perception or deficits in language (aphasia)
what is oral apraxia?
difficulty carrying out oral movements to command i.e sticking out tongue
what is limb apraxia?
difficulty performing precise, voluntary movements i.e tying shoelaces
what is the more likely cause of AOS (Duffy, 2020)?
left hemisphere stroke (affects the posterior frontal lobe)
what are some other causes of AOS (Duffy, 2020)?
- traumatic brain injury
- dementia
- tumours
what tends to accompany AOS (Duffy, 2020)?
- right hemiplegia
- non-verbal oral dyspraxia
- co-existing aphasia
what is the motor speech programmer?
“neural network that sequences motor movements needed to produce speech accurately”
who wrote the definition & context for the motor speech programmer?
Freed, 2023
what does the motor speech programmer do?
- analyses the linguistic, motor, sensory and emotional information of a planned speech act
- sequences information into a neural code that represents the muscular contractions needed for an intended utterance
What are the primary characteristics of AOS?
- prosody abnormalities
- slow speech rate with lengthened vowels, consonants or both
- pauses between phrases, words, syllables or phonemes
- distorted consonants and vowels
- on repetition: errors are consistent for type of error (omission, distortion, substitution) and for location
what are some non-discriminative characteristics of AOS (can occur in aphasia and/or dysarthria too)?
- speech initiation problems
- increasing errors with length and complexity
- automatic speech better than propositional
what are some characteristics that do NOT diagnose AOS?
- limb or non-verbal dyspraxia
- expressive-receptive language gap
- anticipatory errors i.e apple -> papple
- transposition errors i.e elephant -> ephelant
what are some characteristics that rule out AOS? (Waumbaugh et al., 2006a)
- normal prosody
- consistently normal or fast speech rate
- muscle weakness
what are some characteristics for severe AOS?
- limited meaningful utterances
- automatic speech may be no better
- errors may approximate target
- usually accompanied by dysphasia
