Speech and language disorders in children from public schools in Belo Horizonte

OBJECTIVE: To investigate the prevalence of oral language, orofacial motor skill and auditory processing disorders in children aged 4-10 years and verify their association with age and gender. METHODS: Cross-sectional study with stratified, random sample consisting of 539 students. The evaluation consisted of three protocols: orofacial motor skill protocol, adapted from the Myofunctional Evaluation Guidelines; the Child Language Test ABFW - Phonology; and a simplified auditory processing evaluation. Descriptive and associative statistical analyses were performed using Epi Info software, release 6.04. Chi-square test was applied to compare proportion of events and analysis of variance was used to compare mean values. Significance was set at p≤0.05. RESULTS: Of the studied subjects, 50.1% had at least one of the assessed disorders; of those, 33.6% had oral language disorder, 17.1% had orofacial motor skill impairment, and 27.3% had auditory processing disorder. There were significant associations between auditory processing skills’ impairment, oral language impairment and age, suggesting a decrease in the number of disorders with increasing age. Similarly, the variable "one or more speech, language and hearing disorders" was also associated with age. CONCLUSIONS: The prevalence of speech, language and hearing disorders in children was high, indicating the need for research and public health efforts to cope with this problem.