Linguistic and articulatory aspects of single word production in apraxia of speech.

The errors of ten apraxic speakers on a single word task were analyzed to determine the effects of articulatory and linguistic variables on speech production. Results suggested that phoneme difficulty but not phoneme position or grammatical class significantly affected the errors of the subjects. A significant low positive correlation between mean word abstraction and the errors of the apraxic speakers was observed although correlations for the grammatical classes decreased with increases in abstraction. These findings were interpreted to suggest that impaired motor speech programming may be affected by linguistic and articulatory variables.