Can a child have CAS and autism at the same time?

Yes. CAS occurs at higher rates in children with autism spectrum disorder than in the general population. When both are present, the communication challenges stack on top of each other, and it's hard to tell which difficulties come from CAS and which are autism-related. An SLP experienced in both areas is important for sorting this out. CAS treatment doesn't change fundamentally because of the autism diagnosis, but delivery often needs adapting.

How do I know if my child is a late talker or has something more serious like CAS?

Late talking generally means delayed but otherwise typical-pattern speech. CAS has specific tells: inconsistent errors (the word sounds different each time), odd rhythm or stress, vowel distortions, and oral groping. A child who babbled normally and then stopped, or who loses words they had, is more likely to need a motor speech evaluation than a child who's simply slow to add vocabulary. An SLP is the right person to tell the difference.

What age is CAS usually diagnosed?

Most SLPs hold off on a firm CAS diagnosis before age 2.5 to 3, because the diagnostic features are hard to assess in a child with very few words. A working diagnosis of suspected CAS can come earlier, and treatment should begin regardless of whether the label is final. By age 3 to 4 the picture usually clears, and by school age most children with significant CAS have a confirmed diagnosis.

Does CAS go away on its own without therapy?

No. CAS does not resolve without intervention. Unlike some mild speech delays that clear up with development, CAS needs specific, motor-focused speech therapy. The research is clear that children with CAS who get appropriate treatment make meaningful progress, and those who don't fall further behind. Early, frequent therapy gives the best outcomes. Waiting to see if the child grows out of it is not a sound plan.

How often does a child with CAS need speech therapy?

Most clinical guidance points to at least 3 to 4 sessions per week for children with CAS, especially in an early intensive phase. That's more frequent than typical speech therapy recommendations and more than many school-based programs provide. The higher frequency rests on motor-learning principles: movement sequences need many repetitions across short intervals to stick. If your child's school offers one session per week, supplementing with private therapy is often worth discussing.

Can CAS be misdiagnosed as something else?

Yes, and fairly often. CAS gets mistaken for a phonological disorder, a general expressive delay, or even selective mutism. The inconsistency that defines CAS can look like inconsistency in any struggling talker. Misdiagnosis is less likely when the evaluating SLP has specific CAS experience and uses tools built to look at motor speech patterns. A second opinion from a specialist is reasonable if the diagnosis doesn't match what you see at home.

Is childhood apraxia of speech genetic?

There's evidence of a genetic component. Mutations in the FOXP2 gene were identified in a family with a severe speech and language disorder that included apraxia-like features, and that finding drove a lot of research. Most cases of CAS, though, aren't explained by a single gene mutation. CAS tends to run in families, and there's a higher rate of speech and language disorders in first-degree relatives of children with CAS. Genetic testing is not a standard part of CAS diagnosis.

Will my child with CAS need AAC or alternative communication?

Not every child with CAS needs AAC. But for children with severe CAS and very limited intelligible speech, augmentative and alternative communication tools can cut frustration and support language development while spoken words are being built. Research does not support the idea that AAC slows speech development. Having another way to communicate often reduces the pressure and lets a child engage more fully in therapy. Make the decision with your SLP.

How can I help my child with CAS at home between therapy sessions?

Ask your SLP for a specific home practice plan, because generic advice to 'talk more' doesn't help with CAS. Effective home practice usually means short, structured sessions (5 to 10 minutes) on a small set of target words your SLP chose, using the same cueing approach the therapist uses. Consistency beats duration. Recording home practice and sharing it with your SLP is also useful for tracking progress.

Does CAS affect reading and writing too?

CAS primarily affects spoken language, but children with CAS have an increased rate of literacy difficulties, particularly with the phonological awareness skills that underlie reading. A child who struggles to sequence and produce speech sounds may also struggle to map sounds to letters. Once a child with CAS reaches school age, a literacy screen alongside speech monitoring is reasonable to ask about.

What is the difference between CAS and dysarthria?

Both are motor speech disorders, but the mechanism differs. Dysarthria comes from weakness, paralysis, or incoordination of the speech muscles themselves, producing consistent, often slurred or breathy speech. CAS is a planning and programming problem with no underlying muscle weakness, and its key marker is inconsistency. A child whose speech sounds consistently slurred or weak is more likely to have dysarthria. A child whose errors shift across attempts is more likely to have CAS.

How to tell if your child has childhood apraxia of speech

Q: What are the earliest signs of childhood apraxia of speech in babies?

The earliest signs often include limited babbling, a narrow range of sounds before age 1, and first words that appear and then seem to disappear. Some babies with CAS are unusually quiet compared to siblings. These aren't diagnostic on their own, but they're the patterns a speech-language pathologist asks about during a history, and they're worth raising at the 12 or 18-month well visit.

Toddler attempting to speak while a caregiver listens attentively at home

Last updated 2026-07-10

TL;DR

Childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) is a motor speech disorder where the brain struggles to plan and sequence the mouth movements needed for talking. It affects roughly 1 to 2 children per 1,000. Watch for sound errors that change every attempt, silent groping mouth movements, and speech that falls apart as words get longer. Only a speech-language pathologist can diagnose it, but parents can start spotting the patterns around age 2.

What childhood apraxia of speech actually is

Childhood apraxia of speech, usually shortened to CAS, is a motor speech disorder. That word "motor" matters. It's not a language disorder, not a hearing problem, and not muscle weakness: your child's mouth muscles work fine. The problem sits in how the brain plans and programs the movements those muscles need to make.

Think of it as a wiring problem, not a hardware problem. Your child likely knows exactly what they want to say. The words are there. But the signal from the brain to the lips, tongue, and jaw gets scrambled on the way out, so speech comes out wrong or doesn't come out at all.

The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association defines CAS as "a neurological childhood (pediatric) speech sound disorder in which the precision and consistency of movements underlying speech are impaired in the absence of neuromuscular deficits." ^[1] That phrase about the absence of neuromuscular deficits is the whole point: this is a planning and sequencing problem, not weakness.

CAS falls under the broader category of apraxia of speech, which also affects adults, often after a stroke. In children, the cause is usually unknown (called idiopathic CAS), though it can show up alongside cerebral palsy, Down syndrome, or autism. The childhood apraxia of speech overview covers treatment approaches and long-term outcomes in more depth.

How common is it?

CAS affects roughly 1 to 2 children per 1,000, or about 0.1 to 0.2 percent of the general population, according to ASHA's Practice Portal. ^[2] Estimates vary and nobody has clean data on this. Some researchers put the rate as high as 1 in 10 among children who already carry a speech sound disorder diagnosis, since CAS shows up more often in kids already getting speech help.

Boys get diagnosed about twice as often as girls, and researchers aren't sure whether that's a real biological difference or a referral bias. ^[2]

CAS is rare enough that many pediatricians, and even some general speech therapists, rarely see a case. That's one reason it gets missed. A child with CAS might carry a "late talker" label, or get treated for a plain phonological disorder, for months or years before anyone lands on the right diagnosis.

How CAS compares to other speech/language conditions	Estimated prevalence
Late talking (under age 3)	~15-18% of toddlers ^[3]
Speech sound disorders (all types)	~8-9% of children ^[4]
Childhood apraxia of speech	~0.1-0.2% of children ^[2]
Stuttering	~1% of children ^[4]

Look at that table and one thing stands out: CAS is uncommon even among speech problems. That rarity is exactly why getting the diagnosis right matters so much.

Early signs in toddlers

The earliest signs can show up before a child ever tries a word. Parents often remember the baby being unusually quiet, barely babbling, or sticking to one or two sounds. That's not a firm diagnostic criterion, but it's a pattern SLPs ask about when taking a history.

In toddlers, roughly ages 1 to 3, a few things stand out. A typical 12-month-old babbles across a range of sounds: ba, da, ma, ga. A toddler who produces only one or two different sounds, or who babbled and then went quiet, is worth watching. First words may come late and then plateau or disappear entirely: a child says a word once or twice and seems to lose it. That's regression, and it's a genuine red flag, not a sign your child is simply on their own timeline.

Trouble imitating speech on request is another marker. Ask a toddler with CAS to copy a word, and they often can't do it on demand, or they produce something different every time they try. Vowel errors matter too, and get overlooked: most parents, and even some clinicians, focus on consonants, but vowel distortions are a hallmark of CAS and show up far less in other speech disorders. ^[1] And frustration tends to build, since the child usually knows what they want to say and can't get it out. You may see meltdowns tied to talking, or a child who gives up on words and points instead.

No single sign confirms CAS. But several of these together is the moment to request a formal evaluation, not the moment to wait and see.

CAS versus a regular speech delay

This is where families spend months confused, and understandably so. A plain speech delay means a child produces sounds and words, just later than average, and the errors stay consistent. They might always say "wabbit" for rabbit, or always drop the last consonant. The pattern is predictable.

CAS breaks that predictability in specific ways. Inconsistency is the hallmark: a child with CAS might say "potato" cleanly once, then "totato," then "pato," across three tries in one sitting. That variability is one of the three core diagnostic features ASHA names for CAS. ^[1]

Prosody, the rhythm, stress, and melody of speech, tends to be off too. Children with CAS often sound robotic or choppy, land stress on the wrong syllable, or speak in a flat monotone, and that feature helps separate CAS from a phonological disorder. Speech also tends to get worse as words get longer: a child might nail "cup" and fall apart on "cupcake," because longer utterances demand more motor planning and expose the deficit more sharply. Watch, too, for groping, where the mouth moves silently or makes several visible attempts before the word arrives. SLPs call this oral groping, and it points straight at a breakdown in motor planning.

Modeling the word clearly doesn't help as much either. A plain speech delay often improves when a child hears a clear model and imitates it. Kids with CAS frequently don't get the same lift, because the problem isn't hearing the word, it's executing the movement sequence. And the two can coexist: a child can carry a phonological disorder and CAS at the same time, which muddies the picture and is one more reason to see a specialist who assesses across repeated sessions rather than a single visit.

The three features clinicians look for

ASHA's 2007 Technical Report on CAS named three features that, together, are the strongest clinical markers for a diagnosis. ^[1] These aren't parent checklists, they're judgment calls an SLP makes during a formal assessment, but knowing them helps you understand what the clinician is chasing.

The first is inconsistent errors on consonants and vowels across repeated tries at the same word or phrase: the child says it differently each time. The second is lengthened and disrupted coarticulation, the smooth blend of one sound into the next. In CAS those transitions turn choppy or slow, with pauses where there shouldn't be any. The third is inappropriate prosody: odd rhythm, stress, or intonation, especially when the child tries to stress the right syllable and can't manage it.

A 2011 study by Shriberg and colleagues found these three features, taken together, held up with reasonable diagnostic validity, while warning that no single marker is pathognomonic (meaning no one sign proves CAS on its own). ^[5] Diagnosis stays a matter of clinical judgment, never a checklist.

Some clinicians bring in standardized tools too. The Diagnostic Evaluation of Articulation and Phonology (DEAP) and the Dynamic Evaluation of Motor Speech Skills (DEMSS) both target motor speech patterns, though not every SLP reaches for the same instrument. Training and access vary a lot from clinic to clinic.

CAS alongside autism and other conditions

Yes, this happens more than most people expect. CAS shows up at higher rates in children with autism spectrum disorder, Down syndrome, fragile X syndrome, galactosemia, and certain genetic conditions. ^[1]^[6] When a child has both ASD and CAS, the communication challenges stack on top of each other and get hard to pull apart.

For a child with autism who has little or no speech, observation alone often can't tell you whether the silence comes from social-communication differences, from motor planning trouble like CAS, or from both, which is why autism spectrum speech therapy has to be built around the individual child, and why a differential diagnosis from an SLP who works in both areas carries real weight.

Kids with CAS and autism sometimes lean hard on echolalia (repeating heard speech), because reciting a memorized phrase takes less real-time motor planning than building a new sentence from scratch. If you notice a lot of that, bring it up with your SLP; the echolalia article walks through what's typical versus what signals a need for more support.

When CAS pairs with another condition, AAC devices and other augmentative tools tend to come in earlier and get used more widely, since the child needs a second output channel while spoken words are still under construction. AAC doesn't replace speech therapy for CAS; the research points to the two working side by side.

What does a formal CAS evaluation look like?

A proper evaluation is done by a speech-language pathologist, ideally one trained and experienced in motor speech disorders. Pediatricians can refer you, but they can't diagnose CAS themselves, and a hearing screening is not a substitute for a speech-language evaluation.

The SLP will usually start with case history, asking about pregnancy and birth, early feeding, babbling, family history of speech or language issues, and when you first noticed a problem. Then comes an oral motor exam, watching how your child moves lips, tongue, and jaw both during non-speech tasks and while talking, since the goal is separating strength (usually fine in CAS) from coordination and sequencing (often the real problem). The SLP will also gather a sample of spontaneous speech and may ask your child to say the same word several times to check for consistency, and depending on age and cooperation, may bring in standardized tools built specifically for motor speech. A dynamic assessment often rounds things out: the clinician tries different cues (visual, tactile, auditory) to see how your child responds to support, which tells them a lot and shapes the treatment plan that follows. One visit may not be enough for a confident diagnosis, especially with very young children or kids with almost no speech. Many SLPs will give a working diagnosis of "suspected CAS" and start treatment while watching how the child responds over time. The evaluation itself often runs 1 to 2 hours. If your child's school or district handles this through early intervention or special education, the scope may look different from a private clinical workup. Both have value, but a private SLP who specializes in CAS can sometimes go deeper on the motor speech piece.

At what age can CAS be diagnosed?

Here's the honest, slightly uncomfortable answer: CAS is hard to diagnose reliably under age 3, and many clinicians hold off on the firm label before 2.5 to 3. That's not gatekeeping, it's just that the diagnostic features, especially inconsistency across repeated tries at the same word, are tough to pull out of a child who barely has words yet. That's not a reason to wait for help, though. It's why an SLP might use "suspected CAS" while starting treatment anyway. The treatment for suspected CAS is specific enough that it differs from treatment for a standard phonological disorder, so getting started matters whether or not the label is locked in yet. By age 3, most SLPs feel comfortable making or ruling out the diagnosis. By school age (5 to 6), it usually firms up, though some mild cases stay hidden until reading and writing demands expose the leftover difficulties. The AAP recommends that pediatricians screen for speech and language delays at every well-child visit.^[3] If your pediatrician uses the Ages and Stages Questionnaire (ASQ) or the Survey of Well-being of Young Children (SWYC), those tools can flag a general delay, but they aren't built to catch CAS specifically. A referral to an SLP is the right next step the moment you're concerned.

What should I do if I think my child might have CAS?

Don't wait, that's the short version. The longer version: ask your pediatrician for a referral to a speech-language pathologist. If your child is under 3, ask specifically about early intervention services in your state, provided under Part C of IDEA at no cost to families.^[7] If your child is 3 or older, the school district must evaluate and, if eligible, provide services under Part B. When you book the appointment, ask the clinician directly whether they have experience with motor speech disorders and CAS specifically. Not every SLP does, and that's fine, but CAS treatment is specialized enough that you want someone who's done it before. While you wait, keep a short video log: record your child trying the same word on different days. That footage is genuinely useful, because it shows the SLP the variability pattern without them having to catch it live in one session. It also helps to know what a session of speech therapy looks like and what to bring. If in-person options are thin or waitlists are long, online speech therapy is more available every year and has a growing evidence base for school-age children, though access for very young toddlers is still limited. For families who want to practice between sessions, the Little Words app (littlewords.ai/start) has a short quiz to help spot communication patterns and point you toward guided practice. Think of it as a between-sessions tool, not a stand-in for an SLP evaluation.

How is childhood apraxia of speech treated?

CAS needs frequent, intensive, motor-focused speech therapy. The research here is clearer than in a lot of pediatric speech pathology: treating CAS like a phonological disorder, drilling rules about which sounds go where, works less well than motor-learning approaches built around movement practice.^[8] The most studied treatments are the Nuffield Dyspraxia Programme (NDP3), Dynamic Temporal and Tactile Cueing (DTTC), Rapid Syllable Transition Treatment (ReST), and the Lindamood Phoneme Sequencing Program (LiPS). The techniques differ, but they share a motor-learning frame: heavy repetition of movement sequences, with targeted feedback along the way. Frequency matters a lot here. ASHA guidance and most clinical consensus point to at least 3 to 4 sessions per week for children with CAS, especially during the early intensive phase.^[1] That's more than many school-based programs offer, which is part of why private therapy or a mix of settings gets recommended so often. Parent coaching moves the needle too. Therapists who teach parents to practice correctly at home between sessions tend to see better results. "Practice" for CAS is specific: it's not drilling random words, it's repeating the same motor patterns in short, structured blocks. Progress can be slow. Some children make big gains with the right treatment; others carry residual difficulties into school age or beyond. An honest prognosis from your SLP beats generic reassurance every time. A 2015 study by Murray, McCabe, and Ballard found that both treatment intensity and treatment approach significantly affected outcomes in children with CAS.^[8]

Could it be something else?

Several conditions can mimic CAS, overlap with it, or get confused for it, and knowing the differences helps you ask sharper questions during an evaluation. A phonological disorder shows up as a consistent, rule-based error system (the child always swaps one sound for another). Speech sounds odd but predictable, and it responds better to phonological treatment than CAS does. An articulation disorder is narrower still: errors stay consistent and usually involve one or a few specific sounds (a lisp, for instance), motor planning is intact, and the task is just learning to physically produce that one sound correctly. Dysarthria is a motor speech disorder driven by real muscle weakness or paralysis. Unlike CAS, it tends to sound slurred, weak, or breathy, with errors that stay consistent rather than shifting, and it often travels with conditions like cerebral palsy. Expressive language delay looks different again: limited vocabulary and trouble building sentences, but the sounds the child does produce come out clearly, because the problem is language content, not motor planning. Selective mutism is different too: the child speaks normally in some settings and goes silent in others, driven by anxiety rather than motor planning. Children with autism can show atypical prosody, echolalia, and inconsistent speech that looks a lot like CAS on the surface, and telling them apart takes careful assessment of both language and motor speech.^[6] A qualified SLP can usually sort these out during an evaluation, though in complex or very young cases the picture may stay fuzzy at first. "Suspected CAS" as a working diagnosis, treated with motor-speech-focused therapy, is a reasonable path while things become clearer.

What questions should I ask the speech therapist at the first appointment?

Walking in prepared changes the conversation. Ask how many children with CAS the clinician has evaluated and treated: there's no magic number, but someone who's seen dozens of cases reads the differential faster than someone who's seen two. Ask what assessment tools they'll use, and listen for tools built for motor speech, like DEMSS, DTTC-based probes, or structured consistency tasks; a standard articulation test on its own can't diagnose CAS. If they do diagnose CAS, ask which treatment approach they use, and look for familiarity with at least one of the motor approaches mentioned above. Ask how often they recommend therapy. If the answer is once a week, ask whether that fits a motor speech disorder or whether more intensive options exist. Ask how you'll know if your child is making progress and which measurable outcomes they'll track. Ask how to practice at home and what exactly to do: the answer should be more concrete than "just talk to your child more." And ask whether they'll coordinate with your child's school team, since clinic-to-school communication matters more and more once your child hits school age. You don't have to interrogate anyone. These are normal questions, and any good SLP will expect and welcome them.

Parents usually start noticing something's off well before a diagnosis is possible, and the questions that come up over and over deserve straight answers rather than more jargon. Here's what I tell families when they ask. The earliest signs of childhood apraxia of speech in babies tend to show up as limited babbling, a narrow range of sounds before age 1, and first words that appear and then vanish again. Some babies with CAS are just unusually quiet compared to their siblings. None of this confirms anything on its own, but it's exactly what a speech-language pathologist wants to hear about during a case history, and it's worth mentioning at the 12 or 18-month well visit. CAS and autism can absolutely occur together, and CAS shows up at higher rates in kids with autism spectrum disorder than in the general population. When both are present, the communication challenges pile on each other, and it gets genuinely hard to tell which struggles trace back to CAS and which are autism-related. Finding an SLP with experience in both is worth the extra search. The treatment approach for CAS doesn't change because of an autism diagnosis, but how it's delivered often needs to flex. Telling a late talker apart from a child with CAS comes down to the pattern, not just the timeline. Late talking usually means speech that's delayed but otherwise develops typically. CAS has more specific tells: the same word coming out differently each time, odd rhythm or stress, distorted vowels, visible groping for the right mouth position. A child who babbled normally and then stopped, or who loses words they once had, is a stronger candidate for a motor speech evaluation than a child who's simply slow to add new words. Either way, an SLP is the one who can actually tell the difference. As for timing, most SLPs won't commit to a firm CAS diagnosis before age 2.5 to 3, since the diagnostic features are tough to assess in a child who barely talks yet. A working diagnosis of suspected CAS can come earlier than that, and treatment should start regardless of whether the label is locked in. By age 3 to 4 the picture is usually much clearer, and by school age most kids with significant CAS have a confirmed diagnosis. It's worth being blunt about one thing: CAS doesn't resolve on its own. Some mild speech delays clear up with time, but CAS needs targeted, motor-focused therapy to improve. Kids who get appropriate treatment make real progress; kids who don't tend to fall further behind. Early, frequent therapy produces the best outcomes, so waiting to see if a child grows out of it isn't a reasonable strategy. On frequency, most clinical guidance calls for at least 3 to 4 sessions a week, especially during an early intensive phase, which is more than typical speech therapy recommendations and more than most school programs offer. This comes down to motor learning: building new movement sequences takes many repetitions in short intervals to stick. If your child's school only provides one session a week, it's worth discussing whether private therapy on top of that makes sense. Misdiagnosis happens more often than people expect. CAS gets mistaken for a phonological disorder, a general expressive delay, or even selective mutism, because the inconsistency that defines CAS can look a lot like inconsistency in any child who's struggling to talk. An SLP with specific CAS experience, using tools built to assess motor speech patterns, is less likely to get it wrong. If the diagnosis doesn't match what you're seeing at home, a second opinion from a specialist is a fair ask. There does appear to be a genetic piece to this. Mutations in the FOXP2 gene turned up in a family with a severe speech and language disorder that included apraxia-like features, and that discovery pushed a lot of research forward. Still, most CAS cases aren't traced to a single gene. CAS does tend to run in families, and first-degree relatives of children with CAS have higher rates of speech and language disorders themselves, but genetic testing isn't a standard part of diagnosis. Not every child with CAS needs AAC, but for kids with severe CAS and very limited intelligible speech, augmentative and alternative communication tools can ease frustration and support language development while spoken words are still being built. The research doesn't back up the worry that AAC slows down speech. If anything, having another way to communicate takes the pressure off and lets a child engage more in therapy. This is a decision to make with your SLP, not on your own. At home, generic advice like "talk to your child more" won't move the needle with CAS, so ask your SLP for an actual practice plan. Effective home practice is usually short (5 to 10 minutes), structured, and built around a small set of target words your SLP has chosen, using the same cueing approach used in sessions. Consistency matters more than duration. Recording practice sessions and sharing them with your SLP also helps track what's working. CAS is mainly a spoken language issue, but children with CAS have a higher rate of literacy difficulties too, especially with the phonological awareness skills that reading depends on. It makes sense: a child who struggles to sequence speech sounds may also struggle mapping sounds to letters. Once your child hits school age, it's reasonable to ask for a literacy screen alongside ongoing speech monitoring. People often confuse CAS with dysarthria, but they're different mechanisms. Dysarthria comes from weakness or incoordination in the speech muscles themselves, so the speech sounds consistently slurred or breathy. CAS is a planning problem rather than a muscle problem, and its signature is inconsistency: the errors shift from one attempt to the next. Consistently slurred speech points toward dysarthria; errors that keep changing point toward CAS. Insurance coverage for CAS therapy varies widely by state and plan. The Affordable Care Act requires most plans to cover habilitative services, including speech therapy for children, but the number of covered sessions per year differs a lot from plan to plan. Under IDEA, children under 3 with CAS may qualify for free early intervention, and kids 3 and older may get school-based speech therapy at no cost if they qualify for special education services. Anything beyond what insurance or school covers is often an out-of-pocket expense for families.

Sources

ASHA, Technical Report: Childhood Apraxia of Speech: ASHA defines CAS as a neurological childhood speech sound disorder and identifies three core diagnostic features: inconsistent errors, disrupted coarticulation, and inappropriate prosody.
ASHA, Childhood Apraxia of Speech practice portal: CAS prevalence estimated at approximately 1-2 per 1,000 children; boys diagnosed at roughly twice the rate of girls.
American Academy of Pediatrics, Developmental Surveillance and Screening: AAP recommends developmental surveillance at every well-child visit; late talking affects approximately 15-18% of toddlers.
NIDCD (National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders), Statistics on Voice, Speech, and Language: Speech sound disorders affect approximately 8-9% of children; stuttering affects approximately 1% of children.
Shriberg LD et al., Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 2011: The three core features of CAS have reasonable diagnostic validity when assessed together; no single sign is pathognomonic for CAS.
Tierney C et al., Pediatrics, 2015 (CAS and autism co-occurrence): CAS occurs at elevated rates in children with autism spectrum disorder and other neurodevelopmental conditions including Down syndrome and fragile X syndrome.
U.S. Department of Education, Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), Part C: Under Part C of IDEA, early intervention services for children under 3 with developmental delays including speech disorders are provided at no cost to families.
Murray E, McCabe P, Ballard KJ, Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research, 2015: Treatment intensity and use of motor-learning-based approaches significantly affect outcomes in children with CAS; phonological treatment approaches are less effective than motor-focused ones.
Apraxia Kids, Overview of CAS: Practical guidance on CAS signs, diagnosis, and recommended frequency of therapy (3-4 sessions per week in intensive phases).
Vargha-Khadem F et al., Science, 1995 (FOXP2 and speech/language disorder): Mutations in the FOXP2 gene were identified in association with a severe speech and language disorder including apraxia-like features, suggesting a genetic component to some cases of CAS.

This is general information, not a diagnosis. If you have concerns about your child's speech, talk to your pediatrician or a speech-language pathologist.