Topic: Assessment and Management of Childhood Apraxia of Speech: From Early Childhood to Adolescence
Limited scholarships are available for individuals working in Montana public schools. Scholarship recipients will be notified within 2 weeks of request. Please do not register separately for this conference unless you do not receive a scholarship award email by March 18, 2025.
Children with CAS are varied and dynamic. There is no one-size-fits-all approach. This presentation will help guide clinical decision- making through the ages and stages of the child. The ASHA position statement on CAS (2007) provided SLPs with an excellent foundation of information regarding the core characteristics of childhood apraxia of speech (CAS), additional characteristics, and recommendations for assessment and treatment. Since its publication, more research has revealed how the disorder presents at different stages of development, from infancy (Highman et al., 2018; Overby et al., 2019) to adolescence (Burns, 2011; Turner et al., 2018). Hence, the core characteristics; inconsistent errors, disordered prosody, and poor co-articulation (ASHA, 2007), often used when diagnosing verbal children with CAS, have not always been helpful for very young children who are minimally or non- verbal or adolescents who have had some of their motor speech challenges remediated. Thankfully, there are more recent assessments (Strand & McCauley, 2019) guidelines, and resources (Fish & Skinder-Meredith, 2023; Iuzzini-Sigel & Murray, 2017; Iuzzini-Seigel, 2022) to direct our clinical decision-making when diagnosing a child with CAS.
Speaker: Dr. Skinder-Meredith received her doctorate from the University of Washington and her M.S. from the University of Arizona. She is a professor at Washington State University in Spokane and is the chair of the Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences. She is an experienced clinician who has worked in public schools, hospitals, university clinics, and private practice settings. Her primary clinical and research interest is in pediatric motor speech disorders, and her secondary area is cleft lip and palate. She has published and presented her research on childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) at national conferences and is co-author of Here’s How to Treat Childhood Apraxia of Speech, 3rd edition. She co-founded Camp Candoo for children with CASin 2013 and started a camp for bilingual children with CAS in 2024. Dr. Skinder-Meredith has given numerous workshops for practicing speech-language pathologists nationally and internationally on the assessment and treatment of CAS.
