[2] AOS is a loss of prior speech ability resulting from a brain injury such as a stroke or progressive illness.
[7] Individuals with acquired AOS demonstrate hallmark characteristics of articulation and prosody (rhythm, stress or intonation) errors.
Various patients with damage to left subcortical structures, regions of the insula, and Broca's area have been diagnosed with AOS.
Since most with this form of AOS are at least fifty years old, few fully recover to their previous level of ability to produce speech.
[11] Recent research has established the existence of primary progressive apraxia of speech caused by neuroanatomic motor atrophy.
Using speech and language, neurological, neuropsychological and neuroimaging testing, the researchers came to the conclusion that PAS does exist and that it correlates to superior lateral premotor and supplementary motor atrophy.
[13] However, because PAS is such a rare and recently discovered disorder, many studies do not have enough subjects to observe to make data entirely conclusive.
[15] According to Ziegler et al., this difficulty in diagnosis derives from the unknown causes and function of the disorder, making it hard to set definite parameters for AOS identification.
In this way, AOS is a diagnosis of exclusion, and is generally recognized when all other similar speech sound production disorders are eliminated.
Although both disorders present with symptoms such as a difficulty producing sounds due to damage in the language parts of the brain, they are not the same.
[2] For severe forms of AOS, therapy may involve multiple sessions per week, which is reduced with speech improvement.
Another main theme in AOS treatment is the use of repetition in order to achieve a large number of target utterances, or desired speech usages.
This technique utilizes a great amount of repetition in order to practice the sequences and transitions that are necessary in between production of sounds.
This acronym stands for Prompts for Restructuring Oral Muscular Phonetic Targets, and takes a hands on multidimensional approach at treating speech production disorders.
The main focus is developing language interaction through this tactile-kinetic approach by using touch cues to facilitate the articulatory movements associated with individual phonemes, and eventually words.
The term apraxia was first defined by Hugo Karl Liepmann in 1908 as the "inability to perform voluntary acts despite preserved muscle strength."