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Posted By: quaz Oral apraxia/verbal apraxia/apraxia of speech? - 09/17/09 09:05 PM
Does anyone here have any experience with having a gifted child and a child that shows any of these. (I believe that verbal apraxia and apraxia of speech are the same).

What symptoms did you see?
How much of this condition impacted giftedness or their day to day academics?
What have you done at home to help?
If your child had verbal/apraxia of speech, how severe of an affect did you see on articulation?
How was your child's ability to decode words? How was your child's ability with rote memorization in an areas such as math facts?

My child has been in speech for a while. While I do not believe apraxia is necessarily the right diagnosis, there are some apraxic tendencies. This seems to be a matter of having a square peg child that doesn't quite fit nicely into any of the round diagnostic holes out there.

thx
Tammy
hi tammy welcome! lets bump up this post and hope someone who knows will see it. best wishes grinity
My child is 9. He was diagnosed at 3.5 years with Childhood Apraxia of Speech. He has been receiving speech at the elementary school ever since. He has expressive and receptive delays. He now speaks very clearly, we're just working on the letter 'r'.
But... I wonder how the processing issue effects him in other ways. Just responding to someone when they shout Hello to him from across the hall, or saying good morning to the teacher as he enters the classroom. Approaching friends to ask them to play. Just being able to "banter" back and forth with friends. Although he is very smart: honor roll all year in third grade, past advanced on the Standards of Learning in History and Math (scored a perfect 600 on History). His Naglieri test are in the 90 percentile ranks. But for some reason he is not qualifying for gifted and talented. I'm in the process of appealing and finding out more. I wonder how his non-verbal skills have affected his testing as well as social skills. I'm in a quandry at the moment.
My DS8 was diagnosed with Oral Motor Dyspraxia of Speech when he was 3. He was totally non verbal, and he couldn't even make basic sounds like "da"or "ba". He did not babble at all when he was a baby. He was also diagnosed with sever Mixed Receptive/Expressive Language Disorder at the same time. There were some subtle symptoms associated with the diagnosis. He could not stick his tongue out and move it around. He could not use a straw, (he had no idea how to suck) and he could not blow air. His 4-year-birthday was his first time that he could blow the candles out without any help!
His speech pathologist said he has Auditory processing Disorder as well, but he's got Autism Spectrum Disorder diagnosis, so I don't know which diagnosis is associated with which symptoms... It's complicated.
He had about 3 years of intensive speech therapy, and his articulation is fine now. His speech/language evaluation shows no significant delay in any area at age 8.
He still has some oral/facial muscle control issues, (he can't brink one eye at a time, or can't make certain facial expressions) but we are practicing these movements at home whenever we can.

As for his decoding ability, he was really good at it. He could "read/decode" 5+ letter words when he was about 18 months. Then shortly after, he started spelling those words that he had memorized from books and DVDs with magnetic letters. He could spell more than 200 words when he was 2. So I would say, yes he had an excellent memory. Also, I'm not sure if this is related to "rote memorization", but his Working Memory Index score on WISC-IV is 144.

I hope you'll find some answers.
Best wishes!
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