Oral-Movement Abilities and Articulatory Characteristics of Brain-Injured Adults

Abstract

We compared the performance of 28 brain-injured adults who displayed articulation problems with that of 28 adults with no history of brain-injury on tests of isolated oral movement and oral-motor sequencing. An attempt was made to classify the brain-injured patients by administering an articulation test and employing three criteria for differentiating apraxia of speech from dysarthria: presence of initiation errors, more substitution errors than combined omission and distortion errors, and the presence of islands of error-free production. While the brain-injured group performed significantly worse on the isolated oral-movement and oral-motor sequencing tests than the normal adults, not all brain-injured patients demonstrated difficulty on these tasks. We were able to identify 13 patients who met all three criteria (apraxia of speech), 3 who met none (dysarthria), and 12 who met one or two but not all (mixed apraxia of speech and dysarthria). Isolated oral-movement and oral-motor sequencing deficits were found in all three groups, but no significant differences among groups on these tasks were observed.