by admin | Jan 20, 2017 | news
Characteristics of Childhood Speech Apraxia
Childhood Apraxia of Speech (AHI) is a type of motor disorder that affects the production of speech. Motor speech disorders are neurological in nature. It means that a child's brain has difficulty coordinating the parts of the body that produce speech. Structures such as the tongue, lips, and lower jaw may be affected.
Researchers believe that deterioration in the speech processing system occurs between phonological coding and the motor execution phase. When children with apraxia try to communicate their ideas to us, they don't do it properly. They struggle to sequence and articulate sounds, syllables and words. This results in difficulty in moving quickly and accurately between sequences of articulatory configurations. These configurations are necessary for the production of continuous and intelligible speech.
Causes of Childhood Speech Apraxia
Children with AHI may also have a disorder in motor sensory areas, such as proprioception. We find an inability to understand the spatial position of the articulatory structures. For the most severely affected children, even initiating speech movement gestures can be difficult. Apraxia is different from other motor speech disorders because it is not caused by muscle weakness, limited range of motion, or paralysis of the muscles.
Apraxia is most often caused by nerve damage due to infection, disease, injury, or trauma. It may also be a secondary feature of other conditions such as genetic, degenerative, metabolic, and even seizure disorders. However, not all children with this type of disorder will have apraxia. There are also cases where the cause of apraxia is unknown and there is no apparent neurological indicator of why a child is exhibiting apraxia in speech.
Manifestations of Childhood Speech Apraxia
AHI is a difficult disorder to identify because of its complexity. Symptoms also vary in severity. However some of its more common features include:
- You're late. This symptom can be shared with many other disorders. However, if your child is considered a "late talker," apraxia may be one reason.
- Articulatory attempts. This is a kind of quest or fighting behavior. Your child tries several times to articulate sounds with his tongue, lips, or lower jaw.
- Inconsistent errors. The child produces different types of errors in the same word when repeating it. Depending on the level of severity, your child may be able to accurately produce the objective statement in context. But, it will be unable to produce the same objective accurately in a different context.
- Automatic speech is better than spontaneous speech. The child's automatic speech and imitated speech will be less affected than spontaneous speech. Has more difficulty with voluntary and self-starting statements compared to learned, automatic, or modeled statements.
- Difficulty in multisyllabic words. Errors increase with the length or complexity of the statements. There is more difficulty in multi-syllabic or phonetically challenging words
- Prosody affected. There is a monotonous speech or emphasis on the wrong syllable or word. Affected speed, time deficit in the duration of sounds and pauses.
- Reduced speech intelligibility. It will be difficult for unknown listeners to understand children with apraxia.
Who can help my child with Apraxia?
If you think your child may be exhibiting symptoms of AHI, it is important to be evaluated by a speech therapist. At Speech Therapist we will be able to provide you with a differential diagnosis. Currently research does not show consistency in which characteristics are most important to support the diagnosis of apraxia of infant speech. It is also unclear which or how many characteristics should be present for diagnosis. Therefore, the speech therapist must be experienced and use her clinical judgment in the diagnosis.
We don't have an easy solution for apraxia, and because it can manifest differently in every child we don't have the same formula for everyone. Rather we offer you a variety of individualized techniques. Treatment outcomes depend on the severity of the child's apraxia, as well as whether there are other associated problems.
Children with Apraxia Del Habla Infantil progress to levels of intelligible speech and effective communication. Many children can become intelligible speakers.
Consistent practice and repetition are important and necessary keys to helping children with apraxia achieve an adequate level of communication, which is why we guarantee a professional and evidence-based approach.
Visit us at our office or contact us at 70928392. We are located in Guadalupe, San José. Remember that neither you nor your child are alone!
Lic Rocío Vargas.
by admin | Jan 18, 2017 | news
Among the most common cases in the consultation we find parents worried because their children are oral respirators. One of the causes of this disorder is adenoid hypertrophy. Children breathe through the mouth because the nose is blocked. This type of breathing can lead to symptoms such as nasal congestion, snoring, sleep apnea, and chronic ear infections. Hypertrophy adenoid usually goes hand in hand with tonsillitis and among its symptoms we can observe irritated tonsils, white or yellow coating on the tonsils, change of voice due to swelling, sore throat, difficulty or pain when swallowing, swollen neck nodes, bad breath and fever.
If your child has these symptoms and his or her quality of life is affected , your doctor will most likely recommend that you remove the adenoids and tonsils by surgery called adenoidectomy - tonsillectomy. This surgery is recommended in children who present more than three episodes of infection per year because in addition to the symptoms mentioned above, in the long term it is desired to avoid risks of developing rheumatic fever (affecting the heart valves) and damage to the filtering cells of the kidney. This surgery is ambulatory and has an average duration of one hour.
After surgery, some patients may have hypernasal speech (excessive nasal speech) as the sound is oriented toward the nose and will normalize until the soft palate has been stretched enough to close the space left by the absence of the tonsils and adenoids. In most cases, no additional exercises are necessary to achieve this closure. However, some blowing exercises can speed up the process and ensure a faster recovery. It is very important to wait until the recovery process is complete before starting the murmur exercises. If you don't find the results you expect over the next 2 or 3 months, consult your doctor, who may recommend that you see a speech therapist.
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by admin | Jan 11, 2017 | news
Speech and language disorders are relatively common in preschool and school children. However, their consequences may worsen once they enter the education system. The child is now in a new, fully oralized and demanding environment.
Language or speech difficulties have negative effects on children. We could talk about 3 main aspects.
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In the child's communication with teachers and peers.
Those children whose difficulties make them unintelligible . That is, they will not be able to effectively communicate their feelings and needs to their teachers, peers or any listener outside their home.
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In the child's learning.
Language alterations in children have negative consequences on academic performance. Mastery of both expressive and comprehensive language is fundamental to the learning process. Aspects such as literacy, reading comprehension, familiar vocabulary, new vocabulary and amplification of concepts need language. If the student has deficiencies in these aspects he will have other difficulties. We may encounter problems in withholding information and understanding read and written information. Children with language impairments usually have impaired hearing skills, such as discrimination and auditory retention of information. This makes the results in subjects based on teaching methodologies such as dictation deficient.
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In the psychological and emotional development of the child.
The child who does not receive the right therapy at the right time drags these problems along through his school years. These become more and more critical as academic demands increase. The end result is a discouraged student with low academic performance and low self-esteem. Also many of these children are excluded by their peers because of their difficulty in communicating.
This is why children who have failed to develop age-appropriate verbal skills will need additional encouragement. In this sense, language therapists, whether in schools or in private practice, can provide specialized intervention to support the student until necessary.
Ask about our support services in both Speech and Occupational Therapy. We're in Guadalupe, San José.
Rocío Vargas Moya
by admin | Jan 10, 2017 | news
The sounds of speech have an approximate age of acquisition and although there are different parameters between authors, all agree on the difficulty of sounds such as the R and the S . This graph shows the sounds and age ranges in which they should appear. However, this is NOT the only factor to consider when diagnosing speech delay.
by admin | Jan 10, 2017 | news
In the month of December I had the opportunity to attend the Wordcamp US . An event held in the city of Philadelphia where users of the WordPress tool met to learn and share experiences. How is technology complemented by speech therapy? We are preparing a surprise that will help parents and children with the practices at home! Stay tuned! 
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