A Case of Speech Delay with Impaired Auditory Perception and Apraxia of Speech

Abstract

The subject was a 9-year-old boy with an unusual form of speech delay. There were four deaf and dumb relatives. His gestational and birth histories were unremarkable. His gross motor development was not retarded, and he walked at 1 year old. In early infa-ncy, he could not understand spoken language, and he spoke no meaningful words. He had autistic tendency and behavioral problems. He was regarded to have severe mental retar-dation. Numbers and letters (Hiragana) were understood at four to five years old. By five years old, he understood the spoken language, and his autistic tendency had disappeared. On his first visit to our hospital, oral apraxia and verbal apraxia were recognized, and speech therapy was initated. He was able to speak meaningful words at five years old, and thereafter the number of his spoken words increased. At eight years old, his intelligence quotient was IQ 104. At present, he has no behavioral disorder, but has mild oral apraxia, verbal apraxia, disturbance of prosody and grammatical error. © 1983, The Japan Society of Logopedics and Phoniatrics. All rights reserved.