PURPOSE: To verify the performance of children with and without phonological disorder in diadochokinetic tasks and the existence of correlation between the diadochokinetic test and the index Percentage of Correct Consonants Revised. METHODS: Thirty five children with ages between 4:5 and 10:7 years, 15 with diagnosis of phonological disorder and 20 without language deficits (Control Group), participated in the study. The following protocols were carried out by all subjects: diadochokinetic test, anamnesis, phonology and vocabulary tests of the ABFW - Teste de Linguagem Infantil, spontaneous speech and oral sensorimotor structures' assessment. Based in the phonology test and the spontaneous speech assessment, the severity index Percentage of Consonants Correct - Revised was calculated. In the diadochokinetic test, the repetition speed was obtained dividing the number of sequences that the child produced by the time taken to do it. RESULTS: Statistical analysis identified significant differences in the speed of sequences repetition per second and in the production of correct and incorrect repetitions in the diadochokinetic test. There was a correlation between the diadochokinetic test sequences and the index Percentage of Consonants Correct -Revised only in the Control Group. CONCLUSIONS: The phonologically disordered children had lower repetition speed and produced more incorrect repetitions in the diadochokinetic test. Only the Control Group showed correlation between the diadochokinetic test and the index Percentage of Consonants Correct - Revised, suggesting an inter-relationship between maturation of speech motor processing and phonological development. The importance of the diadochokinetic test for evaluation and differential diagnoses of phonological disorders is suggested.
Speech disorders; Articulation disorders; Child development
