Can CAS Coexist With a Phonological Disorder?

Full transcript

Hi, it's Nicole from the NYU Motor Speech Lab. I got a question I wanted to answer for our Instagram world: can a child present with CAS as well as a phonological disorder? The answer is absolutely yes.

How are we able, as diagnosticians, to tease out that it's both? We're going to do our dynamic assessment, and we'll see the observable characteristics we use to identify CAS, which we've talked about. But we'll also do a single-word assessment, like the Goldman-Fristoe, and the phonological patterns will pop; we'll really see them. I do want to point out that this is typically a child with more skill and more output, so you're able to hear and see that consistency.

So what do you do with treatment planning? I have a little girl right now who has CAS. She's highly unintelligible in spontaneous output, but at the single-word level you can make out what she's trying to say, and there are a lot of phonological patterns in her output. One of them is stopping. So when I chose her treatment targets, I purposely put continuants into those words and phrases, so I'm working on both the motor planning and the phonological pattern. For instance, one of her targets is "go fish." Another one is "movie." Another one is "octopus," with that nice continuant.

So they do coexist, and CAS is frequently comorbid with other diagnoses. There is a way to really think about your individual client and work on both goals simultaneously.