Wellington speech and language therapist Christian Wright explains childhood apraxia of speech, where some children have difficulty putting sounds and syllables together.

Wellington speech and language therapist Christian Wright explains childhood apraxia of speech, where some children have difficulty putting sounds and syllables together.

The condition is very rare he told Kathryn Ryan. And has three distinguishing features.

The first, he says, is inconsistency.

"These are the kids when they are trying to speak and put sounds and syllables together find it very hard to be consistent, because they're having enormous difficulty coordinating the plans to move the speech musculature of the mouth - your tongue, your lips and your jaw."

The messages that the brain is sending are getting disrupted and confused, Wright says.

The second is difficulty transitioning between different sounds and syllables, and syllables and words.

"These transitions often they take longer than normal, they become disrupted. Their speech doesn't feel very continuous. There's no good flow to it, it's stilted and feels like they're producing it syllable by syllable."

The third feature is prosody which is where we put stresses, the pitch and rhythm of speech.

"These children have very unusual prosody. Maybe their stress is very even across the speech, and the rhythm is quite broken.

"So, it creates a monotone robotic sort of feel to the speech. "

Other presentations may be making mistakes with longer, more complex words and syllables, poor vowel accuracy and tongue coordination problems, he says.

"They sometimes have these tongue-lip groping kind of behaviors where you can see as they're trying to imitate this speech that their tongue is worming around in the mouth and, their lips are not sure whether to close or open or to make a flat shape or a round shape.

"So, it looks very inconsistent this sort of reaching for these sounds and these words."

It is a difficult condition to diagnose, he says, but signs can appear at age two to three years.

"If we think about those early signs, it's things like in that two to three-year age group, they've got a very limited range of consonants.

"Parents would often feel as though they don't seem to make a lot of sounds. And the sounds they do they're usually Ps or Bs or Ds or Ms, some of those lip together sounds that you see right at the beginning."

It is very frustrating for the child, Wright says…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details