Avaliação de discriminação auditiva de fonemas em crianças de 16 a 48 meses

Abstract

Phoneme discrimination is fundamental for listeners' response repertoires and even for the development of speech in children. However, to date, few studies have dedicated to investigating this topic with children under 5 years old. Therefore, the objective of this study was to propose a task to assess auditory discrimination of phonemes and test it on individuals aged between 16 and 48 months. Six children with typical development participated in the study, three of them between 16 and 32 months old and the other three between 33 and 48 months old. Data collection was divided into two stages. The first included a preliminary assessment consisting of anamnesis with parents or guardians, the purpose of which was to select children without language related complaints and hearing issues for the sample. The audiological assessment was carried out to verify whether the children's hearing thresholds were within normal limits for their age group. The phonemes were selected, following the phonological acquisition development framework proposed by Lamprecht et al. (2004). In the first assessment procedure, children were exposed to a situation in which the experimenter paired each test target phoneme with a colored button three times, then presented each of the target phonemes and asked the child to press the correct button. As the participants did not seem to understand the task well, another test situation was proposed. This second test procedure was conducted in the same cabin in which the children underwent the acoustic tests. They were trained to look at light stimuli, which lit up on both sides of the cabin, each one correlated with a phoneme. The target response was to look to the side that was correlated with the correct phoneme. As a result, it was found that the responses presented by participants in Group 1 (16 to 32 months) were not consistent with the pairings, suggesting that auditory discrimination of the phonemes tested is not well established in this age group. Participants in Group 2 (33 to 48 months) performed more correct answers in the same pairs of phonemes, suggesting that discrimination in this group is better established. The participants' difficulty seemed to be related to the type of task proposed. The use of more playful tasks, with technological resources, could have facilitated the participants' understanding of the tasks. We conclude that the way the task was presented in Procedure 1 did not achieve the proposed objective, which was achieved after the changes made in Procedure 2. The results obtained offer this area of study a new possibility of evaluating the auditory discrimination of phonemes and the development of the phonological system in children.