A Sub-Acute Case of Resolving Acquired Apraxia of Speech and Aphasia

Abstract

Apraxia of speech (AOS) is a neurogenic, motor speech disorder that disrupts the planning for speech production. However, there are only a few reports that have described the evolution of stroke-induced AOS symptoms in the acute or sub-acute phase of recovery. The purpose of this report was to provide a data-based description of an individual with sub-acute AOS and aphasia followed from 1 month post-onset a stroke to 8 months post-stroke. Six data collection sessions were conducted at periodic intervals using narrative and procedural discourse tasks and a series of speech and language analyses were completed. The language analyses involved measures of language content and efficiency. The speech production analyses examined the percentage and frequency of errors as well as determining the dominant types of errors produced within and across data collection sessions. For this individual, measures of language content and communication efficiency improved over the six sampling occasions. The number of speech production errors significantly declined after the first data collection session and then gradually over the subsequent sessions. This individual produced five dominant error types within and across sessions. The majority of these error types are behaviors that occur in chronic AOS, but do not distinguish AOS from other acquired neurogenic communication disorders. Due to the lack of research involving acute/sub-acute individuals with AOS additional research is warranted to better understand the evolution of AOS including the speech behaviors that are observed in the acute/sub-acute phase vs. the chronic phase of recovery.