Reconhecimento de fala em escolares com e sem prática musical e diferentes níveis sócio-culturais

Abstract

The effective communication mainly depends on the human being´s capacity in understanding the speech. Many hearing habilities are involved in this process and can be improved with an auditory trainning, becoming an agent that favours the recognition process of the speech. One of the basis of this practice is the plasticity of the central auditory nervous system. For this reason, this research was developed to compare the recognition hability in silence and in noise in students with or without musical practice of different social and cultural levels. Ten children that had had early musical initiation by Suzuki Method (Group A) participated in this study, 15 children of the Army School in Santa Maria (Group B) and 15 children of a Philanthropy School mantained by a Spiritual Society for Study and Charity, also known as Joaquina´s Home (Group C). All volunteers were normal hearing and without otologics complaints, with ages among 7 and 13 years old. A detailed report, inspection of the external acoustic meatus, pure tone audiometry, survey of the speech threshold recognition and speech recognition percent index were done. For Sentence Recognition Threshold (SRT) in Silence and in Noise, it was used the Statement List in Portuguese (Costa, 1998). From the SRT in noise, the Relation Sign/Noise (S/N) was obtained. The statements and the noise (fixed at 65 dB HL) were presented ear by ear by ear phones, by the increasing-decreasing strategy (Levitt & Rabiner, 1967). The following results were obtained: Group A: SRT in quiet = 6,60 dB HL and S/R = -3,94 dB HL; Group B: SRT in quiet = 7,57 dB HL and S/R = -4,61 dB HL and Group C: SRT in quiet = 10,43 dB HL and S/R = -1,54 dB HL. There was a statistically difference among Group C and the two other groups in both evaluated aspects. It was conclued that the social and cultural levels, not concerning the trainning of the hearing habilities by the early musical practice, can affect the hability in recognizing the speech.