Dr. Anita van der Merwe is Professor Emeritus and Research Associate of the Department of Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology of the University of Pretoria in South Africa.

She specializes in motor speech disorders, motor control of speech and voice disorders. She published the Speech Motor Learning (SML) approach to treating apraxia of speech in Afrikaans in 1985.

She has presented numerous courses in South Africa on the diagnosis and treatment of apraxia of speech (childhood and acquired). In 2002 she presented a continuing education course for ASHA at the University of Pittsburg in the USA, and a course for the Primary Care Trust in Morecambe Bay in the UK.

She was invited to act as Keynote speaker at the 32nd Clinical Aphasiology Conference in the USA in 2002.

She contributed a chapter on “The four-level framework for the characterization of pathological speech sensorimotor control” in the book “Clinical management of sensorimotor speech disorders” edited by Dr. M.R. McNeil (1997; 2009).

Dr. Van der Merwe can be contacted at this email address.