Sequential processing deficit as a shared persisting biomarker in dyslexia and childhood apraxia of speech.
Beate Peter, Hope Lancaster, Caitlin Vose and 2 others
PMID 28933620WHAT IT FOUND
Adults with dyslexia and adults with probable childhood apraxia made more errors in the order of sounds and letters than controls on speech and reading tasks.
The errors also tracked with multisyllabic motor speech difficulty.
Key findings
01Nonword repetition scores were lower in adults with dyslexia and adults with probable childhood apraxia than in controls, with no significant difference between the two disorder groups.
02During nonword repetition, the probable childhood apraxia group produced the highest proportion of sequencing errors, followed by the dyslexia and control groups.
03Difficulty keeping sound order in nonword repetition was significantly associated with disproportionate difficulty on multisyllabic motor speech sequences.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The probable childhood apraxia group had normalized conversational speech and was identified partly by family history and low multisyllabic motor speech scores, not by current overt apraxia. The study compared adults at a single time point and did not follow children into adulthood, so persistence was inferred from cross-sectional adult performance plus prior child studies. The probable childhood apraxia group had only 10 participants, and the study lacked power for fine-grained comparisons among individual sequencing error types. The tasks came from standardized tests and were not equivalent in item number, length, and complexity, so comparisons across tasks are indirect. Many participants had zero errors during real word repetition and nonword decoding, which prevented proportion analyses for those tasks. This was an observational assessment study, not a treatment trial.
Declared interests
The authors declared no conflicts of interest. The article is tagged as supported by NIH and non-U.S. government research.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read this as proof that dyslexia and childhood apraxia are the same disorder or that treating sequencing errors improves speech or reading. The study was cross-sectional and observational, and it did not test an intervention.