In the literature, there are various treatments for children with childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) but few discuss treating CAS with a concomitant disorder. CAS can be a challenging disorder to treat and likely to be seen in conjunction with a disorder like autism spectrum disorder (ASD) (Tierney et al., 2015) thus making the treatment more challenging. The purpose of this case study was to evaluate the efficacy of an evidence-based instructional program for CAS, Rapid Syllable Transition (ReST) treatment using the principles of motor learning (PML), and determine if the program would increase natural sounding speech in a boy eight years old with dual diagnoses of mild ASD and moderate CAS by improving the ability to vary the prosodic contours with appropriate intonation and rate in three-to-four syllable pseudo words and generalizing that ability to real words. The treatment, in this A-B single subject design, was intensive in both production (>75) and session frequency (four times per week for 3 weeks). The outcome revealed improvement in the ability to produce variable stress patterns with appropriate rate in three and four syllable pseudo words. Treatment effects generalized to untreated multisyllabic real words. The results supported the use of ReST to address speech naturalness in a child with dual diagnoses of ASD and CAS. Adherence to the PML appear to be a positive component to this approach.
Keywords: speech disorder, autism spectrum disorder, prosody, principles of motor learning, generalization, pseudo words, speech naturalness
