Speech therapy intervention in a case of congenital toxoplasmosis

Abstract

Introduction: Points of calcification in the brain and alteration in routes reception caused by congenital toxoplasmosis imply in the necessity of realizing an investigation of the performance of language and psycholinguistic abilities. Objective: to describe the language evaluation process in a case with history of congenital toxoplasmosis, as well as intervention proposed and the results obtained with speech therapy. Clinical case presentation: The patient, male, with six years old, student in elementary school, underwent 45 sessions of speech therapy during eight months. Regarding intervention, it was used the psycholinguistic model. The evaluations were performed pre and post-intervention, using tests to evaluate the phonological, semantic, syntactic and pragmatic language levels. Results: Regarding the phonology, it was found that the total phonological processes, in imitation test, before intervention was 56 processes and 44 processes after. In the naming test, 50 process cases were observed before, and 48 process cases after. In psycholinguistics results showed bigger gains in the auditory-vocal abilities post-intervention. Final comments: It was emphasized the need of a extensive assessment of language and psycholinguistic abilities in this case. According to the therapeutic proposed we observed changes in phonological, semantic, syntactic and pragmatic levels, but they still are in lag considering the chronological age of the patient.