Dyspraxia: Encyclopedia II - Dyspraxia - Developmental Profiles

Dyspraxia - Developmental Profiles

There are six main areas of difficulty which can be profiled within dyspraxia; the four main areas are listed below:

Dyspraxia - 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.

Dyspraxia - Handwriting and drawing

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 amount of graphemes to be learned – e.g. the letters of the Latin alphabet, as well as 10 numbers.
• Establishing the correct pencil grip.

Dyspraxia - Whole body movement coordination and body image

Issues with fine motor coordination mean that major developmental targets include walking, running, climbing and jumping. 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.

Dyspraxia - 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. People with severe dyspraxia often are incorrectly labelled as spastics, a term which has fallen out of favour recently due largely to derogatory connotations in modern culture.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Developmental Profiles", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki