Abstract
The differentiation of childhood apraxia of speech from severe phonological disorder is a common clinical problem. This article reports on an attempt to describe speech errors in children with childhood apraxia of speech on the basis of gesture use and acoustic analyses of articulatory gestures. The focus was on the movement of articulators and not on phoneme accuracy exclusively. This procedure was used to assess 15 children, who were either typically developing or diagnosed with either childhood apraxia of speech or phonological disorder (5 in each group). The results indicated that the groups with speech disorders performed significantly worse than did the typically developing group, but they did not differ from one another in terms of number of errors. Further analysis of the data revealed that differences among the groups with speech disorders were related to the use of the velum and the coordination between the lips and other articulatory gestures. The results seem to support the notion that articulatory gesture coordination may be more troublesome for children with childhood apraxia of speech. The relevance of this testing procedure for clinical use is described and therapeutic implications from the analyses are proposed.