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

Abstract

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.

Keywords:

• assessment
• diagnosis
• childhood apraxia of speech
• speech sound disorders
• speech and language pathologist
• French-speaking children

Acknowledgments

We thank all children participants and their parents, as well as teachers and SLPs who helped recruit the participants.

EULALIES consortium

Members of the EULALIES consortium include Estelle Gillet-Perret (Centre hospitalier universitaire Grenoble Alpes, France), Laura Machart (Université Grenoble Alpes, France) and Clarisse Puissant (Université Grenoble Alpes, France).

Declaration of interest

The authors report no conflicts of interest.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/17549507.2020.1844799

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.