Cleft palate children: performance in auditory processing tests

Many children with auditory processing disorders have a high prevalence of otitis media, a middle ear alterations greatly prevalent in children with palatine and lip clefts. AIM: to check the performance of children with palate cleft alone (PC) in auditory processing tests. Prospective study. MATERIALS AND METHODS: twenty children (7 to 11 years) with CP were submitted to sound location tests (SL), memory for verbal sounds (MSSV) and non verbal sounds in sequence (MSSNV), Revised auditory fusion (AFT-R), Pediatric test of speech intelligibility/synthetic sentences (PSI/SSI), alternate disyllables (SSW) and digit dichotic (DD). The children performances in the tests were classified in bad and good. RESULTS: there was no statistically significant difference between genders and ears. The average values obtained were 2.16, 2.42, 4.37, 60.50ms; 40.71 to 67.33%; 96.25 to 99.38%; 73.55 to 73.88% and 58.38 to 65.47% respectively for the MSSNV, MSSV, LS, AFT-R, PSI/SSI tests with ipsilateral (PSI/SSIMCI) and contralateral (PSI/SSI/MCC) competitive message, DD and SSW tests. CONCLUSION: a high percentage of children showed worse results in the AFT-R, DD, SSW tests and in the PSI/SSIMCI tests. The best performances happened in the sound location tests, verbal and non-verbal sounds for sequential memory and for PSI/SSIMCC tests.