May 4, 2026 · 0:52 · Making the shift
CAS Is About Coordinated Movement, Not Single Sounds
For Apraxia Awareness Month: in childhood apraxia of speech the core difficulty is planning and programming coordinated movement across sounds, so treatment should target coarticulation, not isolated phonemes.
Nicole Kolenda, M.S., CCC-SLPLead SLP, NYU Motor Speech Lab
Full transcript
In childhood apraxia of speech, we know the core difficulty lies in planning and programming the movements needed for speech.
Speech is not produced one sound at a time. It's coordinated across the sounds in a target word, and we call this coarticulation. A fully executed bicep curl is a useful analogy: it's not a single movement, it's a coordinated sequence.
So just remember: effective intervention really needs to focus on coordinated movement across sounds, and definitely not on isolated phonemes.
