It may start with a simple word you can’t pronounce. Your tongue and lips stumble, and gibberish comes out.

Misspeaking might draw a chuckle from family and friends. But, then, it keeps happening. Progressively, more and more speech is lost. Some patients eventually become mute from primary progressive apraxia of speech, a disorder related to degenerative neurologic disease.

Two Mayo Clinic researchers have spent more than a decade uncovering clues to apraxia of speech. Keith Josephs, M.D., a neurologist, and Joseph R. Duffy, Ph.D., a speech pathologist, will present “My Words Come Out Wrong: When Thought and Language Are Disconnected from Speech” on Sunday, Feb. 14, at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Washington, D.C.

In this video Dr. Duffy discusses the disorder.

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