Phonological Disorder Degree and Speech Recognition Threshold

Introduction: The Phonological Disorder is a communication disorder frequently observed in children, who present their speech with inferior characteristics to their chronological age. With an idiopathic origin, the Phonological Disorder has the Tone Threshold Audiometry as a diagnostic exam, in which one of the carried-out tests is the Speech Recognition Threshold. Although all the children with Phonological Disorder should have normal auditory threshold, this study proposes that the lesser the degree of Phonological Disorder, better the Speech Recognition Threshold.

Objective: Look for correlation between the Speech Recognition Threshold and the degree of Phonological Disorder.

Methods: Quantitative and descriptive study with 87 children with Phonological Disorder, aged between 5 and 10 years, from the analysis of secondary data, collected from VALDEF Database (FAPERGS-case No.0904179 and CNPq-Process No.483886/2010-6). The subjects were divided into groups according to their degree of Phonological Disorder, being those degrees: medium, medium-moderate, moderate-severe and severe, with 30, 38, 9, and 10 subjects in each group respectively. From the results of the Speech Recognition Threshold, the average of both ears for each subject were calculated, and subsequently the average of each group.

Results: The mean results of the Speech Recognition Threshold in each group were medium with 11.34 dB, medium-moderate with 10.79 dB, moderate-severe with 12.78 dB, and severe with 9.25 dB.

Conclusion: Based on these results, one concludes that in this particular sample the Speech Recognition Threshold has no correlation with the subject's Phonological Disorder degree.

Keywords: Phonological Disorder, tone threshold audiometry, Speech Recognition Threshold.