PURPOSE: To compare the performances of children with evolutive phonological disorder (EPD) that had phonologically-focused speech therapy and children with EPD who did not undergo therapy in phonological awareness (PA) abilities. METHODS: Twenty three subjects with EPD diagnosis were evaluated. The 14 children that composed Study Group 1 (SG1) received speech therapy, while the other nine who were part of Study Group 2 (SG2) had not yet received speech therapy. All subjects underwent speech and language pathology evaluation and PA assessment. RESULTS: From the 26 sub-tasks of PA applied, only one showed statistically significant difference, confirming worse performance of the SG2 (p<0.05). However, analysis of the means showed that SG1 tended to present a better performance overall than SG2. Despite these results, even subjects who received speech therapy intervention presented low performances on the tasks. CONCLUSION: Statistically significant difference was observed only in the sub-test T7-two syllables (syllabic reversion) among children with EPD who received speech intervention and children with EPD without speech therapy. However, the group who did attend speech therapy showed a tendency to achieve better performance in the PA tasks.
Speech disorders; Child language; Language development disorders; Child language; Speech therapy
