AOS, in adults (where it is an acquired condition), can often be diagnosed as conduction aphasia. Key difference between AOS and other disorders are:
- Repetitive production of a single word (eg. re-fridg-er-rat-or) will tend to become progressively more intelligible in conduction aphasia sufferers, but AOS speakers will consistently produce the same errors, and repetitions will not improve
- Errors produced in a task by an AOS sufferer are consistent across type (eg. voice phoneme unvoiced, fronted consonant backed), where other illnesses produce inconsistent errors on repetition of a task
- SMR (sequential motor rate, eg. 'pataka pataka') rates are slower than AMR (alternating motor rate, eg. 'papapa' or 'kakaka') rates for AOS sufferers
- Oromotor tasks will not yield AOS symptoms, only tasks requiring production of connected speech
Not present in AOS, and ruling out its diagnosis are features such as:
- Anticipatory errors - such as a final consonant altering initial consonant eg. 'dunited states'
- Transposition errors - eg. 'park'->'carp'
- Weakness of oral structures (oromotor weakness is not the result of AOS, though it may be co-occurring if there is also a dysarthria present)
Features definitively excluding AOS are:
- Fast/normal speech rate
- Normal stress patterns, and smooth transition between words and syllables
Further Reading
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"Apraxia of speech"
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