Children's speech apraxia is a motor speech disorder. When we want to speak, our brain will have an abstract idea, and then the brain will turn these abstract ideas into meaningful speech symbols. Then the brain needs to plan and program these speech symbols, for example, how to locate different speech organs (such as tongue, lips, chin and so on). )? How to control the Force? Or the time required for each vocal organ to move. When the planning and programming procedures are completed, the brain will send information to our voice organs, which will execute voice instructions.

However, children with speech apraxia mainly have difficulties in planning and programming speech symbols. It is worth mentioning that the speech/tone errors made by children with simple aphasia are not due to the damage of their vocal structure or neuromuscular function (such as muscle weakness, paralysis or abnormal muscle tension), but mainly because they have difficulty in planning speech movements.

Common speech characteristics of most children with speech apraxia

● Inconsistency of pronunciation errors: When children are asked to repeat the same syllable or vocabulary, children will have inconsistent initial or vowel errors.

● Oral and lip touch phenomenon: When children are asked to imitate difficult pronunciation/vocabulary or when the number of words that children need to imitate increases, it can be observed that children will try to find the correct pronunciation position or action sequence with their tongue, lips, chin and other vocal organs when speaking.

● Abnormal prosody: children speak slowly when speaking words or sentences, lack of stress changes leads to a flat tone or intonation, or overemphasize stress.

● Limited initials and finals: Children can pronounce fewer initials or finals correctly.

● Vowel or vowel error rate is high.

● It is difficult to rotate the polysyllabic sequence of sounds: it is more difficult for children to pronounce sequential polysyllabic sounds (for example, /pataka/) than to pronounce alternate monosyllabic sounds (for example, /papapa/).

Usually, children with "simple" speech apraxia will have obvious differences in understanding and expression, in other words, understanding will be significantly better than expression. However, some children with speech apraxia may have other types of obstacles, such as language development retardation, expressive language disorder, dyslexia and so on.