[Picture naming and imitation tests as tools for the diagnosis of phonological disorder].
BACKGROUND
phonological disorder.


OBJECTIVE
to verify the association between the phonological performance in picture naming and imitation tasks, assessing the occurrence of phonological processes and using the severity indexes of Percentage of Correct Consonants and Phonological Density Index.


METHODS
participants of this research were 50 phonologically disordered children, with no history of prior speech-language therapy and with ages between 4:0 and 12 years.


RESULTS
The analysis of the phonological processes indicated that the non-productive processes were more frequent than the productive ones, not only in the imitation task but also in the picture naming task. It was observed that in both tasks, most participants presented the phonological processes of cluster reduction, liquid simplification and final consonant deletion, independently of their productivity. When comparing both tasks, there was an association and agreement regarding the number of participants who presented phonological processes as well as a correlation regarding the total number of phonological processes; there was no evidence of differences concerning the averages of the phonological processes observed in the imitation and picture naming tasks; a negative correlation was observed between the severity indexes Percentage of Correct Consonants and Phonological Density Index; moreover, these values presented a strong correlation in both tests, indicating that they detect similar severity levels.


CONCLUSIONS
the study verified an association and agreement between the picture naming and imitation tasks, not only for the number of participants who presented phonological processes, but also for the number of phonological processes, thus indicating the importance of using structured tests for the diagnosis of phonological disorder. Furthermore, for the severity indexes, Percentage of Correct Consonants and Phonological Density Index, a high correlation was observed between the tasks, indicating that both tasks are useful instruments in detecting phonological disorder.
Wertzner
Haydée Fiszbein
HF
Departamento de Fisioterapia, Fonoaudiologia e Terapia Ocupacional, da Faculdade de Medicina da Universidade de São Paulo. hfwertzn@usp.br
Papp
Ana Carolina Camargo Salvatti
AC
Galea
Daniela Evaristo dos Santos
DE
D001184:Articulation Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis*; D002648:Child; D002663:Child Language; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D013062:Speech Articulation Tests / Q000592:standards*; D013063:Speech Discrimination Tests / Q000379:methods / Q000592:standards* / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D013065:Speech Intelligibility; D018709:Statistics, Nonparametric; D014705:Verbal Behavior; D014825:Vocabulary