Ethan:

Ethan Ladd Shreeve. Ethan for Ethan Winthrop on Passions. Kind of embarrasing for me to admit, but you were named after a soap star because he was soooooo cute! Ladd for your grandpa Howard Ladd Gamble, the best man in the world!

Ethan was diagnosed w/ Developmental Verbal Dyspraxia or Developmental Apraxia of Speech at age 2.5.

Best definition of apraxia so far: So to some degree or another, a child with the diagnosis of apraxia of speech has difficulty programming and planning speech movements.

These two terms are generally synonymous. Developmental verbal dyspraxia is often shortened to "DVD" and developmental apraxia of speech to "DAS". The "a" in "apraxia" stands for absence and "dys" in dyspraxia stands for partial. Thus, apraxia is absence of speech and dyspraxia is used by some to indicate some speech ability. "Praxis" indicates difficulty executing skilled movements. However, more recently Childhood Apraxia of Speech is the preferred term for describing apraxia of speech in children.

What is apraxia of speech and how does it differ from a developmental delay of speech? Apraxia of Speech is considered a motor speech disorder. For unknown reasons, children with apraxia have great difficulty planning and producing the precise, highly refined and specific series of movements of the tongue, lips, jaw and palate that are necessary for intelligible speech. Apraxia of speech may also be called verbal apraxia, developmental apraxia of speech, or verbal dyspraxia. No matter what it is called the most important concept is the root word "praxis." Praxis means planned movement. So to some degree or another, a child with the diagnosis of apraxia of speech has difficulty programming and planning speech movements. Apraxia of speech is a specific speech disorder. A true developmental delay of speech is when the child is following the "typical" path of childhood speech development, albeit at a rate slower than normal. Sometimes this rate is commensurate with cognitive skills. In typical speech/language development, the child's receptive and expressive skills are pretty much moving together. What is generally seen in a child with apraxia of speech is a wide gap between their receptive language abilities and expressive abilities. In other words, the child's ability to understand language (receptive ability) is broadly within normal limits, but his or her expressive speech is seriously deficient, absent, or severely unclear. This is an important factor and one indicator that the child may be experiencing more than "delayed" speech and should be evaluated for the presence of a specific speech disorder such as apraxia. However, certain language disorders may also cause a similar pattern in a child. A gap between a child's expressive and receptive language ability is insufficient to diagnose apraxia.