PURPOSE: to compare the performance in the metaphonological skills at the level of syllabic and phonemic awareness, among children with normal development of speech and children with evolutional phonological disorder (EFD), aged 4 and 8 years. METHODS: 49 subjects took part in the research, being 26 of the RG (reference group) without EFD, who were part of the research by Cielo (2001), and 23 of the SG (study group) with EFD. All the subjects were submitted to speech and language pathologist evaluation and the assessment of the phonological awareness. RESULTS: from the twelve sub-tests involving syllabic awareness, six (50%) presented statistically significant difference between the RG and SG, confirming the worst performance by the SG. In the ten sub-tests involving the tasks of phonemic awareness, six (60%) showed statistically significant differences. However, in the analysis of the averages of the successful results there was a tendency of worse performance by the SG if compared to the RG in all tasks. There is a statistically significant difference in the performance of phonological awareness tasks (syllabic segmentation in two syllables, three syllables and four syllables; initial and final syllables detection; syllabic reversion in two syllables; initial and final phoneme detection; phonemic synthesis with three, four, five and six phonemes) among children with normal development of speech and children with EFD. CONCLUSION: in data general analysis, children with EFD were worst than children with normal speech development in PA tasks. In addition to the worst performance, the children with SG also failed to perform the phonemic reversion and segmentation tasks.
Awareness; Speech Disorders; Speech; Speech Perception
