Expressive morphosyntactic development in three children with childhood apraxia of speech

Abstract

The purpose of this research was to examine the expressive morphosyntactic development of three children aged 6 and 7 years with childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) and language impairment. Participants' performance in normative assessments tapping expressive and receptive morphological and/or syntactic skills was examined. Their mean length of utterance, finite verb morphology, personal pronoun and irregular past tense use in a personal narrative task was also examined on three occasions over a year around participation in a phonological awareness intervention. At initial assessment the participants exhibited expressive morphosyntactic deficits when compared with a normative database and showed relative strength in receptive versus expressive morphosyntactic ability on standardized language assessment. The results showed that participants' expressive morphosyntactic difficulties were ongoing and could not be explained solely by their speech errors. The findings add to the growing body of evidence implicating linguistic (as well as motor speech production) difficulties in children with CAS.