The brain has problems planning to move the body parts (e.g., lips, jaw, tongue) needed for speech.
[6] There is no cure for DVD, but with appropriate, intensive intervention, people with this motor speech disorder can improve significantly.
The core impairment in planning and/or programming spatiotemporal parameters of movement sequences results in errors in speech sound production and prosody."
Children with this disorder do not follow typical patterns of language acquisition and will need treatment in order to make progress.
These include autism,[1] some forms of epilepsy,[1] fragile X syndrome, galactosemia[1][20] and chromosome translocations[14][21] involving duplications or deletions.
[16][22] Developmental verbal dyspraxia can be diagnosed by a speech–language pathologist (SLP) through specific exams that measure oral mechanisms of speech.
Even when children are between 2–3 years, a clear diagnosis cannot always occur, because at this age, they may still be unable to focus on, or cooperate with, diagnostic testing.
Experts suggest that extensive practice and experience with the new material is key, so hundreds of target stimuli should be elicited in a single session.
Furthermore, distributed (shorter, but more frequent) and random treatment, which mix target and non-target utterances, produces greater overall learning.
They found positive effects for most of the children in the areas of speech production, phonological awareness, word decoding, letter knowledge, and spelling.