Velar movements during speech in a patient with apraxia of speech.

A fiberscopic observation of velar movements during speech was made of a patient diagnosed as having apraxia of speech. Repeated utterances of the same word showed a marked variability in terms of the pattern of velar movements accompanied at times by a phonetic change. In spite of such a variability, the general successional pattern of velar gestures for a given phonetic context approximated the normal pattern. During the production of nasal and nonnasal consonants the velum tended to take “neutral” positions. Anticipatory coarticulation was present, but some deviation from normal patterns was occasionally observed. Based on these observations, possible mechanisms responsible for the syndrome called apraxia of speech were discussed.