THE INTEGRATED USE OF MAXIMUM PERFORMANCE-TASKS IN DIFFERENTIAL DIAGNOSTIC EVALUATIONS AMONG CHILDREN WITH MOTOR SPEECH DISORDERS

Maximum performance tasks (MPT) were employed to quantify the speech m otor capacities of children with dysarthria and developmental apraxia of speech. Specifically, several MPT (i.e. vowel prolongation, fricati ve prolongation, maximum syllable repetition rate) were conducted amon g nine carefully selected children with spastic dysarthria, 11 childre n with developmental apraxia of speech (DAS), and 11 age-matched norma l-speaking children. The results indicated that children with spastic dysarthria can be differentiated from both DAS and normal-speaking sub jects on only two of the MPT (i.e. monosyllabic repetition rate and vo wel prolongation). Children with developmental apraxia of speech, furt hermore, differed from the normal-speaking children on fricative prolo ngation and trisyllabic repetition rate, as well as on measures of tri syllabic repetitive performances (i.e. number of sequencing errors and number of attempts). The findings underscored the clinical importance of MPT for differential diagnosis, and for the quantification of degr ee of involvement in speech pathology.