Process Diagnosis in Language: Beyond the Complaint

Introduction: Language is the ability to abstract representation of concrete material by conventional signs. Verbal language has two modalities: oral and written.

Objectives: To describe the diagnostic process in children with complaints of speech difficulties.

Methods: It was conducted as a transversal study in which records of patients with complaints of speech difficulties, who attended the outpatient of a children's hospital between 2012 and 2013, were analyzed.

Results: We evaluated 29 medical records of patients with complaints of speech difficulties, 65.51% males and 34.49% females, with a mean age of 6.1. The protocols most frequently used were PROC (48.2%), Protocol of Orofacial Myology (31%), reading and writing tests (20.6%), and CONFIAS (3.7%). In 13 of 29 patients were used over a protocol for review, where reading and writing tests were applied, the need was identified in the interview with the child’s guardian.

Conclusion: Although the complaints of guardians refer speech disorders, it was observed that the abilities of reading, writing, and phonological awareness were assessed. Those facts become important because applying some test does not exclude the need to have well-trained professionals to be able to identify further needs assessment for each patient. The most important fact is that the complaint of speech difficulties is easily detected by parents, differently from the learning difficulty that was identified by the history of the patient and not reported by guardians.

Keywords: language, speech therapy, protocols, evaluation.