Evaluation of phoneme awareness and auditory-verbal skills inpreschool children diagnosed with language and speech disability

In this study, it was aimed to evaluate the listening and speech sound recognition performances of preschool children diagnosed with language and speech difficulties in the Guidance and Research Centers of the Ministry of National Education. As with all children with developmental delay, a multidisciplinary evaluation should be made in children who apply to related centers due to speech delay. During these assessments, auditory-verbal skills, which are one of the necessary prerequisites for speech development, should also be included. Children who do not have good receptive language are less likely to develop age-appropriate expressive language. Thirty participants without any developmental problems other than language development between 6.0 and 6.11 months were included in our study. Children were evaluated with Phoneme Recognition Test (PRT) and Test of Language Development Primary Fourth Edştion (TOLD-P4) subtests. The results we obtained as a result of our study largely confirmed our hypotheses. Children generally performed below average on tests assessing listening skills such as Picture Word Recognition, Sentence Comprehension, Phonemic Analysis and Word Identification. These results support our predictions that the listening skills of children with language-speech delay should be evaluated and training programs should be planned for these skills. In addition, the data we obtained revealed that studies with different assessment methods are needed to emphasize the importance of listening skills in this group.