When my daughter came to live with us, just a few weeks prior to her fourth birthday, I was the only person in our home that could understand her. I served as her interpreter at home, at church and at clinics when she began going for various assessments. It was clear to everyone that she really had a lot to say, she just didn’t know how. I’m sure it was very frustrating not having her need met, maybe that’s one of the reasons she never seemed to listen.

Initially the pediatrician ordered a complete battery of hearing test at our local rehabilitation hospital to rule out hearing loss. Her hearing was found to be within normal range. So she was scheduled for individual speech therapy twice a week for an hour each session. She continued with that schedule for about two years, and then transitioned to group speech therapy at the public school. But in the mean time she needed to make her needs known and communicate with her family, friends and teachers.

She was enrolled in an AWANA program at church that involved memorizing short scripture, then repeating the verse to one of the teachers to receive a reward sticker in her Cubbie book. While this was really good practice for proper speech patterns, she obviously had a lot of trouble with it. She seemed to also have trouble with memorization. During one battery of test that we had put her through trying to diagnose the problem we found out that her visual memory score was way above the mean. So we began teaching her American Sign Language by signing the verses that she needed to memorize for AWANA Cubbies.

She really seemed to enjoy signing so she picked it right up. Each week’s new verse added to her sign language vocabulary and really seemed to help her with memorization. I guess it helped her because she could visualize what she was trying to say; sometimes we would even draw pictures for some of the words if she was really getting stuck. Her teachers allowed her to sign the verse instead of saying it and she began receiving her stickers every week which really encouraged and motivated her to try harder.

I noticed that even with years of speech therapy she really struggles with using her tongue and mouth correctly to articulate ideas. She seems to know the words, and she seems to know what she wants to say, but she can’t seem to get it to come out of her mouth that way. She frequently leaves words out of her sentences, or drops suffixes off from her words, so it can be difficult to understand what she is trying to say. Of course some days are better than others. I find it interesting that having proper speech and enunciation role modeled for the past nine years doesn’t seem to make any difference in the way she talks. Just today she was trying to tell me that the baby had drank all but one ounce of her formula. But she kept saying, “Your baby just drank one ounce of her formula.” So I kept asking why she had only had one ounce and where was the rest of the bottle. It took us about five minutes to finally get her words sorted out.

You can read more about developmental Aprxia at:
verbal Apraxia
Developmental Apraxia of Speech