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Dyspraxia may be acquired (e.g. as a result of brain damage suffered from a stroke or other trauma), or associated with failure / delay of normal neurological development - i.e. developmental dyspraxia.
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The term apraxia is more often used to describe this symptom in clinical practice, although strictly apraxia denotes a complete (as opposed to partial) loss of the relevant function. In the UK and elsewhere the term dyspraxia is now more often used as shorthand for 'developmental dyspraxia' in referring to one or all of a heterogeneous range of disorders affecting the initiation, organization and performance of action
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Assessments for dyspraxia typically require a developmental history, detailing ages at which significant developmental milestones, such as crawling and walking, occurred. Motor skills screening includes activities designed to indicate dyspraxia, including balancing, physical sequencing, touch sensitivity, and variations on walking activities. A baseline motor assessment establishes the starting point for developmental intervention programs. Comparing children to normal rates of development may help to establish areas of significant difficulty. Developmental milestones are tasks most children can perform at certain ages. ... Crawling is a form of moving around by some animals, and, in some cases humans, generally involving slow movement on all limbs. ... An animated demonstration of a six-legged insect walking.
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There are six main areas of difficulty which can be profiled within dyspraxia; the four main areas are listed below:
Speech and language
Developmental verbal dyspraxia is a type of ideational dyspraxia, causing linguistic or phonological impairment. Key problems include:
Difficulties controlling the speech organs.
Difficulties making speech sounds
Difficulty sequencing sounds
Within a word
Forming words into sentences
Difficulty controlling breathing and phonation.
Slow language development.
Difficulty with feeding.
Speech organs produce the many sounds needed for language. ... In phonetics, phonation is the use of the laryngeal system to generate an audible source of acoustic energy, i. ...
Fine Motor Control
Difficulties with fine motor co-ordination lead to problems with handwriting, which may be due to either ideational or ideo-motor difficulties. Problems associated with this area may include:
Learning basic movement patterns.
Developing a desired writing speed.
The acquisition of graphemes – e.g. the letters of the Latin alphabet, as well as numbers.
Establishing the correct pencil grip
Hand aching while writing
In typography, a grapheme is the atomic unit in written language. ... The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today.
Whole body movement, coordination, and body image
Issues with fine motor coordination mean that major developmental targets include walking, running, climbing and jumping are affected. One area of difficulty involves associative movement, where a passive part of the body moves or twitches in response to a movement in an active part. For example, the support arm and hand twitching as the dominant arm and hand move, or hands turning inwards or outwards to correspond with movements of the feet. Problems associated with this area may include:
Poor timing
Poor balance
Difficulty combining movements into a controlled sequence.
Difficulty remembering the next movement in a sequence.
Physical play
Difficulties in areas relating to physical play may lead to dyspraxic children standing out from their peers. Major developmental targets include ball skills, use of wheeled toys and manipulative skills, including pouring, threading and using scissors.
Problems with spatial awareness, or proprioception
Mis-timing when catching
Complex combination of skills involved in using scissors
The other two developmental profiles concern dressing and feeding. Proprioception (from Latin proprius, meaning ones own and perception) is the sense of the relative position of neighbouring parts of the body.
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