Moderate CAS

Young children with moderate CAS may only have a few words and use gestures and signs frequently to communicate.

Older children with moderate CAS often have decreased intelligibility (understandability) in sentences and conversational speech due to noticeable speech errors including slow, effortful speech. Difficulty with prosody (rhythm, inflection and rate) of speech often causes speech to sound "robot like."

Children with moderate CAS often make slow progress in traditional speech therapy that emphasizes a phonological (acquisition of sounds) approach, but typically respond well to therapy that targets movement. You can generally expect to progress weekly if your child attends therapy twice or more per week.

Dynamic Temporal and Tactile Cueing (DTTC) and Nuffield Dyspraxia Program (NDP3) have been studied and shown to be effective treating moderate CAS.

Your child's needs determine the appropriate treatment and your child's needs will change over time. This means that at the beginning of treatment your child may benefit from a therapy approach for moderate-severe CAS, such as DTTC and NDP3, but as the deficit in motor planning/programming decreases, they may benefit from other approaches designed for milder severity levels, such as ReST or IPA. At some point, your child may not longer need motor-based therapy, but may still have other concerns, such as language, that can be addressed in traditional speech and language therapy.