Symptom 7: Increased Difficulty with Increasing Complexity – The Cumbersome Cascade
If your child is having a tougher time saying longer words or sentences than shorter ones, you might not just be dealing with a shy introvert. It could be a sign of Developmental Verbal Dyspraxia (DVD). Increased difficulty with increasing complexity is a key symptom that makes this speech disorder particularly challenging for affected children.
Think about it like climbing a staircase. For a child with DVD, saying a single syllable or a short word might be like the first couple of steps – achievable with some effort. But as the complexity increases – longer words, more syllables, complex sentences – it’s as if they’re trying to scale a steep, unending flight of stairs.
For instance, your child might be able to say “cat” but struggles with “caterpillar”. Or, they can handle “run” but get tripped up by “running”. Essentially, as the speech ‘task’ gets more complex, the child’s speech motor planning has to work overtime, often leading to more errors and inconsistencies.
Interestingly, this symptom also surfaces in the form of inconsistency. The child might say a word correctly in one instance but falter when repeating it. These variable speech errors add another layer of complexity to the child’s communication struggles. (7)
