PURPOSE:
to verify the prevalence of speech, language and orofacialmotricity, and a potential association among these factors with social indicators like, socioeconomic status and parents' education in children aged between 4 to 6 years and 11 months, who are enrolled in kindergarten public schools from Santa Maria - RS.
METHODS:
this research is a cross-sectional prevalence survey, in which 262 children aged between 4 to 6 years and 11 months took part. They were students from public schools. An interview with the guardians and a speech-language assessment (language, phonetics/phonology, articulatory and orofacial praxis, orofacial structures) were performed. The children were classified according to the criteria: family income, mother's and father's education, language, speech and orofacialmotricity. The results had statistical analysis with Fischer Test and significance level fixed on 5%.
RESULTS:
the most prevalent disorder was orofacial myology disorder (31,30%), followed by speech (21,37%) and language (4,58%) disorders. No association was found between speech-language disorders and social indicators.
CONCLUSION:
the analyzed sample showed high prevalence of speech-language disorders. This result indicates the importance of speech pathologists' work in the public schools. Probably, the uniformity of the sample caused no association between speech-language disorders and social indicators, suggesting the necessity of performing other researches with more varied samples.
Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences; Prevalence; Child; Child, Preschool
