Aspectos da fluência de fala em transtornos de linguagem na infância

Abstract

To profile the speech fluency of children with neurodevelopmental disorders that affect language. Method: This was a cross-sectional observational study involving 14 children aged between 6 and 12 diagnosed with a language disorder, language development disorder or phonological disorder. The participants were undergoing intervention at the School Clinic of Speech and Language Therapy. The characterization of the participants involved the assessment of language (vocabulary and phonology) and phonological short-term memory. Speech fluency was then assessed based on 200 fluent syllables. After transcribing the speech samples, the parameters of frequency and typology of common and stuttered disfluencies were analyzed, as well as speech rate. Results: The majority (78.6%) of the children had common disfluencies above what was expected for their age, while around a quarter of them had stuttering disfluencies above what was expected. The classification of speech rate performance indicated that half of the children produced a rate of words per minute above what was expected, while less than 20% were below what was expected. The rate of syllables per minute was adequate in 57.1% of the children, although 35.7% were above expectations. Conclusion: Analysis of the speech fluency profile in the study population showed that common disfluencies occurred more frequently than stuttered ones. As for speech rate, the rate of words per minute was higher than expected more often than the rate of syllables per minute.