Apraxia Of Speech Disorders

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INTRODUCTION AND PURPOSE STATEMENT
This paper will define and describe the characteristics, common etiologies and effective treatment options that are affiliated with apraxia of speech. The information learned about this motor speech disorder will help me in the future as a Speech Language Pathologist.
ETIOLOGY
According to Darley, Apraxia of speech (AOS) is defined as a motor speech disorder (MSD) resulting from a neurologic impairment that affects the ability to coordinate and execute speech sounds (Duffy, 2013, p.4). The individual with apraxia of speech has difficulty with the messages from the brain reaching the articulators and does not deal with weak muscles. Apraxia of speech is a result from damage from the part of the brain that
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Prosody is said to be a secondary to articulation due to slowing down, compensating and anticipating the errors ahead. Other common symptoms of AOS are substitution errors, errors in initial consonant in words, groping for desired articulatory postures, reduced efficiency and consistency of oral motor postures for production of speech. Patients with AOS have difficulty with correct placement of affricates, fricatives and the ability to repeat nonsense words (Ogar et al, 2005). A patient with AOS may be aware of their errors or disorder and as a result, show frustration with speech and/or attempts at self-correction and may at times shut down completely. As the length of the words and phrases grow in complexity the higher the possibility of progressive breakdown. However, it is common at times for automatic phrases and well-rehearsed utterances to be produced without errors and may be characterized as “islands” of error free …show more content…
Aphasia is a language disorder that is defined as the inefficiency in processing linguistic units resulting from brain injury in the left hemisphere. People with aphasia may have sound errors that may be similar to AOS such as substitutions, additions, transitions, and omissions, but a result from selecting the wrong phonemes for speech. AOS has been defined as a speech disorder with the inefficiency in motor programming, sequencing and execution of the speech sounds, they plan and select the correct sound needed it’s just not executed. Both disorders have damage to the left hemisphere, middle cerebral artery however AOS has damage to the frontal lobe and aphasia has the damage predominately in the tempo-parietal lobe. AOS and aphasia both have etiologies predominately from strokes. AOS is most commonly accompanied with Broca’s aphasia and Unilateral Upper Motor Neuron (UUMN). UUMN is dysarthria that’s primary characteristics are articulation errors that are mild due the damaged cranial nerves that are associated with the tongue and lips (Duffy, 2013,