What does it mean if my child has apraxia?

Apraxia or speech apraxia as it can sometimes be known as, is a motor speech disorder. There is nothing that you could have done differently to keep your child from getting this, to our current level of understanding. It is when the person knows what they want to say, but are unable to make that thought be performed correctly by the articulators of the mouth so that other people understand them. The movements do not occur, or do not align, and in general the person has difficulty making their thoughts known via verbal productions.

If you’re curious if your infant/toddler has apraxia, it may be possible to see it through a number of observations. Do they attempt to say a given word in a variety of ways for the same word? It is not the same error over and over, but different variations of errors. If you can understand him/her via gestures and other motions, and they seem to understand “everything” you are saying yet they do not speak many words, it could be an underlying reason.