Dynamic evaluation of motor speech skills of children with speech sound disorder between the ages 3:00-6:11

Childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) is a subgroup of speech sound disorders and is a motor speech disorder seen in motor planning / programming of speech. The aim of this study is to diagnose children with CAS and non CAS by performing a dynamic evaluation of the motor speech skills to 82 Turkish speaking children between the ages of 3:00- 6:11, to determine the motor speech characteristics of children, and to compare the language, cognition and motor speech skills of the groups. In the study, the Turkish adaptation, validity, and reliability study of the Dynamic Evaluation of Motor Speech Skills (DEMSS, Strand & McCauley, 2019) test, which is a diagnostic tool of the CAS, was conducted. In the validity analysis of the test, the construct validity and content validity were examined. The reliability study of the test includes internal consistency, test-retest, intra-judge, and inter-judge reliability analysis. The age, gender, and scores of other tests of the children with and without the CAS were compared between the groups. The frequency of CAS characteristics in children with and without CAS was examined as a percentage. The results showed that the validity and reliability of the Turkish DEMSS test obtained strong evidence as a diagnostic tool for the CAS. Children with CAS showed lower performance in all tests compared to the non-CAS group. There was no difference between the groups in terms of age and gender. It has been observed that the Turkish-speaking children with the CAS have all the characteristics of the CAS accepted in the literature. This study contributes to the Turkish and international literature in the dynamic evaluation of the motor speech skills of children with speech sound disorder, the diagnostic process of CAS, and the determination of the CAS characteristics of Turkish-speaking children. Keywords: Speech sound disorder, Childhood apraxia of speech, Validity, and reliability, Dynamic evaluation of motor speech skills.