# Assessment of acquired apraxia of speech: pilot study with the CBO protocol

## TL;DR

This study tested a protocol to identify speech disorders in people with aphasia and found it effective in distinguishing speech errors in Brazilian Portuguese speakers.

## Contribution

The study evaluates the CBO protocol's effectiveness in identifying acquired apraxia of speech in Brazilian Portuguese-speaking individuals with aphasia.

## Key findings

- The CBO protocol differentiated speech errors between aphasia patients and controls in spontaneous speech and repetition tasks.
- People with aphasia showed less fluent, slower speech with more errors compared to the control group.
- The protocol mapped the nature of speech errors and identified key tasks affecting motor speech production.

## Abstract

Acquired apraxia of speech is often a comorbidity that accompanies aphasia. In some cases, it may be difficult to distinguish whether speech errors are phonological (resulting from aphasia) or phonetic (resulting from apraxia of speech).

To verify the capacity of the Costa, Brescancini, and Ortiz (CBO) protocol to identify acquired apraxia of speech in persons with aphasia (PWA) among Brazilian Portuguese speakers.

This is a cross-sectional and prospective study that included the participation of 7 PWA and suspected apraxia of speech (PWAG) poststroke and 25 neurotypical individuals who formed the control group (CG). All participants were followed the tasks of the CBO protocol, such as spontaneous conversation, description of a thematic card, word repetition, and diadochokinesias (DKK).

The protocol differentiated the groups in the spontaneous speech tasks (percentage of errors per word); word repetition list (time, punctuation, quantity, and type of manifestations); and DKK /ka/ and /pataka/. The results showed that the PWAG presented less fluent, slower speech, with more errors than the CG. Additionally, the protocol mapped the nature of the errors.

The protocol enabled the identification of acquired apraxia of speech in PWA. It was also possible to analyze the tasks and linguistic variables that most interfered with the motor production of speech in Brazilian PWA.