PURPOSE: to check the relationship between the performance in the different phonological awareness skills and degree of phonological disorder and analyze the interference of gender and age in the performance of the subjects in the analyzed tasks. METHODS: 32 children, with ages between 4:1 and 7:8 years, with phonological disorders, 12 female and 20 male, were evaluated. All subjects were assessed using the Child Phonological Evaluation proposed by Yavas et al. (1991). The severity of the disorder was determined by the Percentage of Correct Consonants, classifying the phonological disorder as severe, moderate-severe, mild-moderate and mild. After that, we applied the proof of phonological awareness, proposed by Capovilla and Capovilla (1998). RESULTS: it was observed that there are no significant differences in the performance of phonological awareness considering the gender variable. In terms of age, there were significant differences for the phonemic synthesis, syllabic segmentation and transposition tasks between the groups of higher and younger than six years. The synthesis, manipulation and transposition tasks did not differentiate the subjects nor about the degree of phonological disorder or syllabic and phonemic dominion. CONCLUSION: the oldest children showed better performance in the phonological awareness-related tasks. Segmentation tasks showed a tendency for difference among the degrees of phonological disorder to be investigated in future studies.
Articulation Disorders; Speech; Child
