[Working memory abilities and the severity of phonological disorders].
BACKGROUND
Working memory.


OBJECTIVE
To verify the performance of working memory abilities and their relation with the severity of phonological disorders.


METHODS
45 children, with ages between 5.0 and 7.11 years, with evolutional phonological disorders (EFD), 17 female and 18 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 (PCC) proposed by Shriberg and Kwiatkowski (1982), classifying the phonological disorder as severe, moderate-severe, average-moderate and average. After that, subtest 5 of the Psycholinguistic Abilities Test (ITPA--Bogossian & Santos, 1977) and the non-word repetition test (Kessler, 1997) were applied.


RESULTS
After analyzing the data according the statistical tests of Kruskal Wallis and Duncan, it was verified that the performance of moderate-severe and severe individuals in the non-word repetition test was inferior to that of average-moderate and average individuals. However, performance results in the digit repetition test did not present a positive correlation with severity.


CONCLUSIONS
The performance of phonological memory has a relation with the severity of phonological disorders. This allows us to accept the idea that the phonologic memory is related to speech production. Regarding the central executor, the results indicate that the performance in digit repetition, used to assess the central executor, did not present a correlation with the severity of the disorder. This can be justified by the fact that the central executor is more directly related to vocabulary acquisition and is responsible for processing and storing information.
Linassi
Lisiane Zorzella
LZ
Distúrbios da Comunicação Humana, Universidade Federal de Santa Maria. llinassi@terra.com.br
Keske-Soares
Marcia
M
Mota
Helena Bolli
HB
D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001184:Articulation Disorders / Q000145:classification / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000503:physiopathology; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007804:Language Development; D007807:Language Tests; D008297:Male; D008568:Memory / Q000502:physiology*; D010700:Phonetics; D012720:Severity of Illness Index; D013067:Speech Perception; D013068:Speech Production Measurement; D018709:Statistics, Nonparametric