Developmental verbal dyspraxia or apraxia of speech can cause a child to have severe speech difficulties. The difficulties arise when the child is unable to coordinate the muscles of speech accurately and smoothly.  To explain it simply, the signals from the brain to the muscles of speech are not working efficiently so speech is uncoordinated and the sounds in words are mispronounced or missed altogether. Often a child with dyspraxia of speech has other difficulties and these might include fine and gross motor skills difficulties.

Verbal Dyspraxia or apraxia often has associated links to difficulties at the phonological level of speech development. Signs of verbal dyspraxia may present when the child has an obvious speech difficulty, pronounces the same word in different ways, mixes up the order of sounds in a word or words in a sentence, and poor oral coordination skills leading to drooling or messy eating. Speech therapy can be in the form of articulatory drills, or phonological awareness activities. Articulatory drills help strengthen the links from the brain to the speech aparatus, while phonological awareness therapy helps the child develop their awareness of the sounds in words, the links to their word store, and the motor programs that help them articulate the words. 

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