What is speech dyspraxia?
As mentioned above, you may encounter similar terms for this condition such as verbal dyspraxia, apraxia or developmental articulatory dyspraxia. Speech dyspraxia results in unclear speech or speech delay because there is impairment of the voluntary programming of speech muscle movements. These difficulties do not occur with involuntary movements. For example, the child may be able to lick food with his tongue, but is unable to move the tongue to say the ‘l’ sound in a word such as ‘lion’. The problem occurs when the brain tries to programme the speech muscles for a particular movement or sequence of movements – somehow that message gets scrambled. It’s like trying to watch cable television without the right descrambler. There is nothing wrong with your television set. It’s just that your set cannot read the signal that the station is sending out. With dyspraxia, the impairment occurs with the programming of the speech muscles to be positioned at a particular position for a particular
