Clinician Agreement on Behaviours that Identify Developmental Articulatory Dyspraxia

Abstract

This study reports the results of an attempt to find agreement between clinicians on behaviours that they judged distinguished developmental apraxia of speech. Thirty-one clinicians responded to a questionnaire which asked them to classify 18 behaviours as “always”, “sometimes” or “never” associated with one of three types of articulation disorder; functional, dyspraxia or organic. These findings show that the clinicians agreed that four behaviours were “always” associated with dyspraxia. These behaviours were (i) articulator development that was deviant rather than immature, (ii) searching behaviour in attempting some (or all) target phonemes, (iii) an inability to volitionally produce an isolated phoneme, or sequence of phonemes, which had been produced on other occasions, (iv) an inconsistent pattern of phoneme errors. They also agreed that two other behaviours mostly occur in dyspraxia but they sometimes occur in functional or organic articulation disorders. These were (v) the ability to incorporate a target phoneme at a slow but not normal speech rate, and (vi) an ability to progress in the treatment for some (or all) target phonemes.