A Case Study of Suspected Childhood Apraxia of Sign.

This is a single case, so it describes Zoe rather than showing how common or how reliably diagnosable suspected apraxia of sign is. The evidence comes from classroom reports, observation, and clinician-created tasks, not from a validated diagnostic protocol for sign apraxia. The ASL comprehension test was not completed because Zoe had difficulty attending to the videos and understanding much of the vocabulary, so standardized receptive language results are limited. The authors note that location errors could also reflect phonological representation issues, and that motor planning deficits are hard to distinguish from sign phonological disorder because developmental phonological disorders in sign are not well documented. No intervention was tested, so the paper does not show what treatment helps. Some sign-specific errors also occur in deaf autistic signing children, although Zoe's pragmatic skills were typical, so differential diagnosis remains uncertain.

The authors declared no competing financial or nonfinancial interests.

Do not treat this as proof that a sign imitation task can diagnose childhood apraxia of sign. It is a single case, and the authors say more research is needed to separate motor planning difficulty from phonological impairment and to determine how CAS, limb apraxia, and CASign relate.