Automatic phonological analysis of the linguistic productions of Portuguese children with and without language impairment

Automatic phonological analysis is still little used by speech-language therapists despite the numerous advantages it represents over the tradicional manual analysis. This work aimed to stimulate its use for clinical and/or research purposes by demonstrating how the use of the Automatic Phonological Analysis Tools (APAT) allows to reliably differentiatethe linguistic productions of Portuguese children with Development Language Disorder (DLD) from those with typical language development. Specifically, results showed significant differences between the two groups in several measures of severity, namely in Percentage of Correct Consonants (PCC) and Percentage of Correct Vowels (PVC), as well as in the percentage of occurrence of phonological processes. These findings show that the use of the APAT allows not only a deeper understanding of the phonological characteristics of Portuguese children with typical and atypical language development, but also to support professionals in the identification/diagnosis of these children and in the planning of the intervention.