A maturação auditiva e o desenvolvimento de diferentes habilidades do processo de comunicação

Abstract

This research was carried out aiming to evaluate abilities of language, speech awareness, working memory, reading, writing and learning processing in a group of children from 7:0 to 10:0 years old, who presented delay in the maturation of the auditory pathway. The same abilities were compared with a control group composed by children at the same age of maturation of the auditory pathway. The sample was composed of 28 subjects being 14 part of the studied group (GI) and 14 the control group (GII). The subjects from GI presented delay in the stages of maturation of the auditory pathway using behavioral responses between the period of 6 and 18 months. The subjects from GII had normal hearing maturation at the same age. Afterwards, at the ages between 7 and 10 years old, children were recalled to undergo the following evaluations: language assessment regarding vocabulary, phonology, use of grammatical classes, organization of logical sequences, lexical and grammatical aspects; evaluation of working memory; assessment of phonological awareness; reading and writing evaluations; and assessment of hearing processing. The results of the evaluations of both groups were compared and Krista-Wallis non-parametric test was used for statistical analyses. Z Test was also used for determining the proportion differences. For both tests the significance level used was 5 %. The results showed that there was significant statistical difference between GI and GII in the evaluation of language regarding the total number of grammatical elements, the use of pronouns, adjectives and conjunctions, the organization of logical sequences, and regarding the lexical and grammatical aspects. Significant statistical difference between GI and GII was also observed in the results of working memory evaluation of Repeating Digital Sequence task, Scale Score Ranges and SSW Test, as part of the evaluation of the hearing processing. Although there was no significant statistical difference in the other assessments, we observed that the results for GI were lower than the results observed for GII. The results obtained reached the following conclusions: delay in the maturation of the auditory pathway caused deficits in the development of language and speech; working memory presented damage in subjects who had delay in the hearing maturation; and the subjects with delay in the hearing maturation are likely to develop alterations in the hearing processing.