When a young child has a severe speech sound disorder-especially one severe enough to affect the child's intelligibility-it's critical to determine the degree to which motor speech impairment contributes to the disorder. Dynamic Evaluation of Motor Speech Skill (DEMSS) Manual is a psychometrically well-supported tool that helps speech-language pathologists do just that. A criterion-referenced assessment, DEMSS is designed to help with differential diagnosis of speech sound disorders in children with severely impaired speech production. Developed by one of the leading experts on childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) and an expert on test development, DEMSS can be used to diagnose severe speech sound disorders in children 3 and older; facilitate, confirm, or rule out a diagnosis of CAS; estimate the severity of a child's disorder; inform the development of treatment goals; and make decisions about the most effective methods of cueing during treatment. In this concise manual, SLPs will: Get an overview of the purposes and benefits of DEMSS, Learn how to administer and score the assessment, Discover how to interpret DEMSS scores and use them to make diagnostic decisions, Explore how DEMSS was developed and see the research behind it, With this start-to-finish guide to administering DEMSS and using the results to inform next steps, SLPs will support better outcomes for young children with severe speech sound disorders. Book jacket.