Assessment and Diagnostic Standards of Childhood Apraxia of Speech in Turkish-Speaking Children: A Scoping Review.
Eddy C H Wong, Aşena Karamete, Ayşın Noyan-Erbaş
PMID 42741833WHAT IT FOUND
Turkish-speaking children with suspected CAS are assessed with uneven diagnostic quality.
The Turkish DEMSS and Mayo Diagnostic Checklist are used to support diagnosis, but evidence comes from five small studies and Turkish-specific features remain unclear.
Key findings
01The review identified five studies reporting 45 Turkish-speaking children with CAS or suspected CAS, and diagnostic confirmation varied substantially.
02Diagnostic quality improved over time, with recent studies using standardized test-based criteria rather than general perceptual judgement alone.
03The Turkish DEMSS score cutoff of 375 showed high sensitivity and specificity for CAS diagnosis.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
The evidence base was small: five studies and 45 children, with heterogeneous designs and samples. Diagnostic status was not uniform; some participants had suspected CAS, and one study identified CAS-like features in children with allergy conditions, where dysarthria overlap may occur. Earlier studies relied heavily on perceptual judgement, sometimes by non-experts, and did not always specify diagnostic criteria. Few studies mapped assessment tasks to recommended minimal data sets, and psychometric evidence for several Turkish tasks remains limited. The review did not evaluate treatment outcomes. The DEMSS-TR uses broad, non-age-specific cutoffs and requires examiner training, so its diagnostic accuracy depends on administration quality.
Declared interests
The authors reported nothing to report for funding and declared no conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not treat the DEMSS-TR cutoff of 375 as a stand-alone diagnosis or as proof that CAS looks the same in every language. The review included only five studies with 45 children, and it found gaps in Turkish-specific features and diagnostic quality.