Speech perception in the Specific Learning Disorder with and without Persistent Speech Sound Disorder

Purpose  Investigate if speech perception skills can differentiate school children with Specific Reading Disorders (SRD) with and without Persistent Speech Sound Disorders (PSSD).

Methods  80 children, regularly enrolled in the 2nd (N=1), 3rd (N=28), 4th (N=29), 5th (N=15) and 6th (N=7) grades participated in the study. Control Group (CG) (N=48): no complaints, no speech alteration; and Resarch Group (RG) (N=32) – with SRD, RGI (N=15) without PSSD and RGII (N=17) with PSSD. Two tests evaluated auditory input reception: Simplified evaluation of auditory processing; and Perception task of nonwords, with Portuguese language structure (DNPLS). Data was analyzed by: Likelihood Ratio Test, Kruskal-Wallis test, Dunn test with Bonferroni correction, Mann-Whitney test, Spearman correlation, and construction of a ROC curve to obtain a threshold value for the correct answers in the perception of non-words test.

Results  Control and RGI showed higher correct answer scores than RGII. There was no difference between the correct answer distributions of the Control and RGI, and RGI and RGII in the test of DNPLS and the number of correct answers in the CG was higher than in the RGII.

Conclusion  The ability to discriminate non-words enabled the differentiated between school-aged children with SRD associated with PSSD and typical children, thus characterizing this group for presenting a number of correct answers lower than 30.5, considering the task proposed to discriminate non-words. These results suggest that the presence of PSSD worsens the performance in speech perception of the schoolchildren with SRD.

Keywords:
Speech Perception; Speech Disorders; Specific Learning Disorder; Education; Primary and Secondary; ROC Curve