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.