Yes, it's curable. My son was diagnosed with apraxia at 3. He attended special ed preschool and was eventually classified as communication impaired. He recived speech in school 3x/week. We paid privately for an additional 1/week. It was a long road of a lot of repeatative drills but now his only issue is the medial /r/ sound. Next year he will be declassified but will still receive speech 2x/week. Our private speech teacher has told us that he probably won't even need the additional private speech for much longer.
I bought a wonderful kit through www.superduperinc.com it's called Kaufman speech praxis kit and we did the drills at home. What really helped him was learning how to read. When my son had to sound out words he became more aware of the sounds that he was eliminating. He's now seven and no one ever asks him to repeat things. He is now 99 % intelligeable (sp?)
Patty
I also have a friend who has a first grader with apraxia (our kids were in early childhood preschool together). He has made a tremendous amount of progress in speech therapy.
Bridget
Does anybody know if apeaxia can be cured? I know it is a neurological disorder but I am thinking maybe speech therapy can cure it.
Daddy
Daddy I have a close friend who's son has appraxia. I would be more than willing to have her talk to you about it if you would like.
Becky
[QUOTE=fred]Hi Linda,
I'm shooting from the hip, here, so I might be talking from a place of ignorance, but I think the window of opportunity they're talking about is with language acquisition, not with speach articulation issues. If he's communicating with language, even if the speach sounds aren't that good and the words aren't clear, he's within the fabled window of opportunity (if it exists) for gaining language fluency.
[/QUOTE]
Fred,
I do agree with you. My son's preschool speech therapist worked with stroke victims that had physical damage and they were able to significantly improve their speech. Apraxia is really a severe articualtion issue that can be corrected at any age. There are many things that you can do at home like blowing excercises with bubbles and lots of repeatative drills. What children with apraxia need is to be taught the correct placement of the tounge and lips. Once they learn it (since it's not second nature for them) they just need lots of practice to make it like second nature.
My son who has apraxia didn't get really good services until he was 5. He started receiving speech in school at 3 but the speech therapist wasn't that great. We started with additional speech privately because we really noticed little improvement between 3-5. At 5 he entered kindergarten and we got an awesome therapist. When he started reading and I mean really reading at 6 is when we saw a HUGE difference.
Patty
This link below has a ton of good information and a message board for all types of language issues. They have some articles on the positive effects of Omega fish oil (EFA"S) to help kids with apraxia & speech delays as well a book you can order on apraxia called "The late talker" We used fish oil for Sarah for a year when she was diagnosed with delayed myelin but found people were using it for speech delays and apraxia and getting good results. Sarah also had a label of severe articulation disorder and it completely dropped a year later to perfect. Good luck!
http://www.speechville.com/diagnosis-destinations/apraxia/ap raxia.html
Hi Linda,
I'm shooting from the hip, here, so I might be talking from a place of ignorance, but I think the window of opportunity they're talking about is with language acquisition, not with speach articulation issues. If he's communicating with language, even if the speach sounds aren't that good and the words aren't clear, he's within the fabled window of opportunity (if it exists) for gaining language fluency.
Keep pushing for that EI as soon as possible, of course, but just wanted to comment on the window thing.
Oh thank you! I have been driving myself crazy with worry that our window of opportunity was closing quickly. Nikolas does have speech, at least 150 words, mainly labeling. There are days he will say 5-10 new words a day, but I only hear them once. he just started 2 word sentences this week to ask for what he wants, I have only heard 2 but its a start. He often drops the first consonant, although I know he can make the sound. Andrew has pretty good receptive, but his verbal isn't good. He tries, but he sounds like a ventriloquist, like he isn't opening him mouth and using his tongue to talk. I think his tongue doesn't move so I am the only one who realizes he is talking at all. So his word list is much much less. I did wonder if they were talking about children with absolutely no speech, and there is some speech here. There are also a lot of speech sounds, foriegn language talk they call it. That makes sense Fred I'm guessing you're probably right.