The Mind-Body Disconnect: Apraxia, Motor Planning, and Communication Access

In this session, pediatric speech-language pathologist Katja Piscitelli joins host Greg Santucci to make the case that for many non-speaking and minimally speaking autistic people, the body is the barrier, not the mind. Katja is the owner of Total Spectrum Speech, known online as Boho Speechie, and the co-host of The Great Language Partner podcast. She explains apraxia and dyspraxia as a brain-body disconnect, why she was taught it was rare, and why she now assumes motor challenges are at play whenever a child seems not to understand or not to want to participate. Together they work through what she calls motor coaching, talking to the body rather than the mind, with scripts for speech and AAC that anyone can use. They cover shared joy as a clinical skill and a written goal, gestalt language processing and where a motor lens complicates it, presuming competence as the least dangerous assumption, and reading behavior through the nervous system, sensory, and motor lenses at once. Katja is also candid about her experience training in Spelling to Communicate, a method that remains debated in the field, and about her own cautious and evolving position on it. Therapists, educators, and parents will come away with concrete motor-informed strategies, a measurable shared joy goal, language for coaching a body that will not cooperate, and Greg's reminder that assuming a sensory or motor difference is a good place to be wrong. Grounded in Katja's clinical work and in what non-speakers have told her directly, this session is a clear, humane argument for looking at the body before making assumptions about the mind.