Aiden Hall is a typical 6-year-old boy. He loves his scooter and superheroes.

Asked if he likes starting first grade at Mars Primary Center, Aiden says, “I don’t know. It’s good, yeah” and offers that he likes “lunch and recess but the classes take long.”

Superheroes bring a more enthusiastic response.

“I like Spider-Man and the Marvels,” said Aiden, adding his favorites are “Captain America and the Hulk, sort of both.”

Getting Aiden to express his opinions took four years and 700 hours of therapy, said his mother, Nadine Hall of Mars.

Aiden has childhood apraxia of speech (CAS), a little-known disorder that makes it difficult for children to accurately produce sounds or words despite having a good understanding of language.

Hall said, “Right before he was 2, I noticed something was wrong. People would say to me ‘He should really start talking. He understands what we are saying.’”

“At 1, children start talking,” Hall said. “They start saying ‘Da-da’ or ‘Pa-pa.’ With Aiden, days would go by and he was silent. He wouldn’t cry. There was no cooing and no crying.”

“The first doctor said there was nothing wrong, but I knew something was wrong,” said Hall.

She opted for another opinion. And she opted for early intervention for Aiden.

“It’s not been easy,” she said. “I knocked on a lot of doors, called a lot of people. A lot of people ignored it. They think they will grow out of it.”

Nadine and her husband, Shawn, saw speech therapists and occupational therapists. They had Aiden’s hearing tested half a dozen times. He’s been to the Children’s Institute and Children’s Hospital.

“I had a therapist who noticed he was tongue tied. He couldn’t lick a lollipop,” she said.

She said Aiden underwent surgery on the muscle under his tongue.

“The therapist would be playing ball and say to Aiden, ‘Go,’ and Aiden would go ‘Boo!”’

Hall said, “When we had our evaluation here, the therapist said ‘Wow, you really have your own language don’t you?’”

“I could understand him, but sometimes we couldn’t. He always understood what you were saying,” she added.

“Apraxia of speech is when your brain can’t tell your muscles to move in a certain way to form words,” she said.

“The 700 hours of therapy is retraining his brain,” she said.

“Aiden didn’t know that he had apraxia, he just knows that he’s going to school,” Hall said.

Katie Micco, a licensed speech language pathologist at the Children’s Pine Center in Wexford, part of Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC, has been Aiden’s therapist since February 2012. She said Aiden has come a long way in their twice-weekly sessions.

“He’s such a fun kid to work with. He’s motivated by his interest in Marvel superheroes and Angry Birds,” said Micco.

“What we’ve been working on are his sound production skills, improving his speech intelligibility,” said Micco.

She said today’s session centers on Aiden following directions while dealing with background noise.

Micco said, “For therapy, we take a multisensory approach. We cue in a variety of different descriptive cues, verbal placement, touch and gesture cues.

“Today we are working on the R and TH sounds,” said Micco. “We are just fine-tuning his skills.”

Despite Aiden’s progress, the mystery of his condition is frustrating to his mother.

“They don’t know what causes it. Is it something in the brain? Is it something that happened in the womb?” said Hall.

The Childhood Apraxia of Speech Association of North America (CASANA) lists three conditions where apraxia can occur:

Neurological impairment caused by infection, illness or injury, before or after birth;

Neurodevelopmental disorders, or

A speech disorder of an “unknown” origin.

Whatever the cause, Micco said, apraxia patients “are a significant percentage of my case load.”

“We are starting to see more children diagnosed with it,” Micco said. “People are getting better at diagnosing it.”

Because of Aiden, Hall is intensely involved in apraxia awareness through CASANA.

“CASANA is an organization that helps you, guides you. There are downloads of different seminars and webinars,” she said.

Hall will be helping out at the Walk for Children with Apraxia of Speech Sept. 21 at North Park.

“I will be there doing the temporary tattoos,” she said. “They have so much fun stuff for the kids: balloons, food. It’s just a mile walk for kids and parents. They give all the kids medals. They all work so hard.”