Ecole d'Orthophonie et d'Audiologie, Faculté de Médecine, Université de Montréal, Montréal, Canada.
Laboratoire de Psychologie et de NeuroCognition, CNRS, Université Grenoble Alpes, Grenoble, France.
Int J Speech Lang Pathol. 2020 Dec;22(6):683-695. doi: 10.1080/17549507.2020.1844799.
Childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) is difficult to diagnose because there is little agreement on objective clinical markers. Since studies of phonological development in French-speaking children are scarce, there are even fewer recognised markers in French as compared to English. This study aims to determine if a set of operationalised, quantitative measures derived from clinical markers of CAS in English corroborate with clinical CAS diagnosis in French-speaking children. This research contributes to improving differential diagnosis of CAS and phonological disorder cross-linguistically.
We collected data from five children diagnosed with CAS, nine children diagnosed with phonological disorder, and 75 typically-developing children aged 5.10-9.2 years old. All children were assessed on three speech production tasks: picture-naming, non-word repetition, and diadochokinesis. We extracted 20 quantitative measures corresponding to commonly accepted clinical features of CAS.
Similar to English-speaking children, French-speaking children with CAS exhibited a high number of vowel errors, consonant and cluster errors, consonant epentheses, devoicing errors, slow diadochokinesis rate, more inconsistency and increased errors with longer words. Contrary to studies on English, these children with CAS did not produce intrusive schwas or vowels.
This multiple-case study highlights the need for cross-linguistic diagnostic criteria for CAS.
儿童运动性言语失用症（CAS）难以诊断，因为在客观临床标志物方面缺乏共识。由于法语儿童的语音发展研究较少，与英语相比，法语中甚至更少的公认标志物。本研究旨在确定一组源自英语中 CAS 临床标志物的可操作、定量测量值是否与法语儿童的临床 CAS 诊断相符。该研究有助于改善跨语言的 CAS 和语音障碍的鉴别诊断。
我们从 5 名被诊断为 CAS 的儿童、9 名被诊断为语音障碍的儿童和 75 名年龄在 5.10-9.2 岁之间的正常发育儿童中收集数据。所有儿童均接受了三项语音产生任务的评估：图片命名、非词重复和双音节词流畅度。我们提取了 20 个定量测量值，这些测量值对应于 CAS 的常见临床特征。
与英语儿童相似，患有 CAS 的法语儿童出现了大量元音错误、辅音和辅音群错误、辅音插入、去声错误、双音节词流畅度较慢、更多的不一致性和随着单词长度增加错误增加。与英语研究相反，这些患有 CAS 的儿童并没有产生侵入性中元音或元音。
这项多案例研究强调了 CAS 跨语言诊断标准的必要性。
