Application of childhood apraxia of speech clinical markers to French-speaking children: A preliminary study.

PURPOSE: Childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) is difficult to diagnose because there is little agreement on objective clinical markers. Since studies of phonological development in French-speaking children are scarce, there are even fewer recognised markers in French as compared to English. This study aims to determine if a set of operationalised, quantitative measures derived from clinical markers of CAS in English corroborate with clinical CAS diagnosis in French-speaking children. This research contributes to improving differential diagnosis of CAS and phonological disorder cross-linguistically.

METHOD: We collected data from five children diagnosed with CAS, nine children diagnosed with phonological disorder, and 75 typically-developing children aged 5.10-9.2 years old. All children were assessed on three speech production tasks: picture-naming, non-word repetition, and diadochokinesis. We extracted 20 quantitative measures corresponding to commonly accepted clinical features of CAS.

RESULT: Similar to English-speaking children, French-speaking children with CAS exhibited a high number of vowel errors, consonant and cluster errors, consonant epentheses, devoicing errors, slow diadochokinesis rate, more inconsistency and increased errors with longer words. Contrary to studies on English, these children with CAS did not produce intrusive schwas or vowels.

CONCLUSION

This multiple-case study highlights the need for cross-linguistic diagnostic criteria for CAS.