Mild CAS

In young children, mild CAS can significantly slow development of single words, cause the child to produce fewer sounds and to make more sound errors when producing words (say the word wrong).

In older children, mild CAS can cause decreased intelligibility (understandability) in sentences and conversational speech and make it difficult to learn new words, especially longer words with multiple syllables. Prosody (rhythm, inflection and rate) of speech may also be impacted causing speech to sound "flat" or lack emotion.

Children with mild CAS generally respond very well to appropriate treatment. Generally, you can expect to see progress with every session for children with mild CAS.

Nuffield Dyspraxia Program (NDP3), Rapid Syllable Transition Treatment (ReST) and Integrated Phonological Awareness Intervention (IPA) have all been studied and shown to be effective treating mild CAS.

Your child's needs determine the appropriate treatment and your child's needs will change over time. This means that at the beginning of treatment your child will benefit from a motor-based approach, maybe even one for severe CAS such as DTTC, but as the deficit in motor planning/programming decreases, they will benefit from other approaches designed for milder severity levels, such as ReST, and will probably eventually progress to traditional speech and language therapy to address speech and language needs.