10/2/2026
Morning Speech Therapy Benefits Youth With Apraxia
Florida Atlantic University study finds timing may improve treatment results without adding hours.
For young people with childhood apraxia of speech (CAS), a disorder that affects the brain’s ability to plan and coordinate the movements needed for speech, difficulties can persist well beyond childhood. Unlike many childhood speech disorders that improve with age, CAS can cause speech errors to continue into adolescence and young adulthood, often requiring intensive, individualized therapy. Yet little research has examined how young people with long-standing CAS learn and retain new speech patterns.
New research from Florida Atlantic University’s College of Education is examining whether the timing of speech practice could make a difference. In a study of 82 adolescents and young adults ages 12 to 21 with and without CAS, researchers found a surprising difference: Participants with typical speech showed a slight benefit from evening training, while those with CAS performed better after morning training. The findings suggest that the time of day may influence speech-motor learning differently in young people with CAS and could eventually help clinicians identify ways to make therapy more effective without simply adding more hours of treatment.
“What’s particularly exciting about these findings is that the timing of speech practice appears to matter differently for people with and without childhood apraxia of speech,” said Anne L. van Zelst, Ph.D., senior author, a speech-language pathologist, an assistant professor in Communication Sciences and Disorders within FAU’s College of Education, and a faculty member of FAU’s Stiles-Nicholson Brain Institute. “For individuals with long-standing CAS, morning training produced more consistent benefits, suggesting that we may eventually be able to use what we know about learning and memory to make speech treatment more effective without simply adding more hours of therapy. If we can identify when the brain is most prepared to learn and retain new speech patterns, we could potentially reduce some of the treatment burden for individuals who have been working on their speech for years.”