Phonological Disorder: Severity Degree and Tritonal Mean of Hearing Threshold

Introduction: Many children have phonological disorders. This occurs when the child has speech changes after the time expected for the acquisition without an etiology to explain this occurrence, in other words, it is idiopathic. One of the criteria evaluated is the child has not hearing loss, so the children have always realize an audiological evaluation to eliminate the possibility of hearing loss. Between the examination tests, the tonal threshold audiometry is extremely important.

Objective: To connect the hearing threshold of children with phonological disorders and severity degree of phonological disorder from secondary data.

Methods: We performed a retrospective quantitative and descriptive study with 20 children with phonological disorder from the analysis of secondary data, collected from VALDEF database (FAPERGS—case number 0904179 and CNPq—process number 483886/2010-6), analyzing the severity degree of phonological disorder and the auditory threshold. The degrees are 4 types: medium, medium-moderate, moderate-severe, and severe and five subjects were analyzed for each type. We performed the mean of tritonal mean for compare with severity degree.

Results: The results of the right ear were the children with medium and moderate-severe degree had 7 dB the mean of tritonal mean; medium-moderate, 9 dB. The left ear, the medium degree had 6.66 dB; medium-moderate, 9 dB; moderate-severe, 7.3 dB; and severe, 10.78 dB.

Conclusion: This study contributes to show that hearing threshold of a child does not have association with severity degree of phonological disorder.

Keywords: Phonological disorder, hearing threshold, severity degree of phonological disorder.