Mild CAS Therapy – Child Apraxia Treatment

Therapy for 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.

What will therapy look like?

Therapy for your child should be individualized to meet your child’s needs. However, there are some common features you should see for a child with mild CAS. Remember, if your child is just starting their therapy journey, their therapy might initially look like therapy for severe CAS, but should progress to therapy for mild CAS as they make progress and their deficit in motor planning/programming decreases. Therapy for mild CAS usually includes things like:

Prosody
Prosody includes the rhythm, rate, smoothness and inflection of speech and is often disrupted for children with CAS, which can make their speech seem "flat" or lack emotion. Therefore, you should see this targeted in therapy. The speech-language pathologist should be helping your child to say words, phrases and sentences in lots of different ways - as a question, with varying emotions, slower or quicker, with different pauses. For example, Let's eat, Grandpa. Let's eat Grandpa! Let's eat Grandpa?
Multisyllabic Words
Multisyllabic words (words that are three syllables or longer) are often difficult for children with CAS and should be targeted in therapy. When the SLP is working on these words with your child, the goal should be for the words to be produced smoothly, at a normal rate and rhythm or stress - not choppy, monotone or super slow.
Longer Sentences
As your child's ability to motor plan for speech improves, they should be using longer and longer sentences. The SLP should be helping them to do this, including working on the right prosody so that your child's speech sounds smooth and interesting (has normal inflection).
Language
Many children with CAS have expressive language deficits that affect their grammar. You should see your child working on language goals like using pronouns (such as she, he, it, her, him) or using past tense verbs (action words) correctly.
New Movements for Speech Sounds
If your child is not yet producing all of their speech sounds (vowels and consonants) correctly, they should be learning a new movement to produce new sounds.