Diagnostic possibilities of ERA in developmental speech disorders

The differential diagnosis of developmental speech disorders may be very difficult. We tried to differentiate between the developmental dysphasia and dysarthria by means of CERA, using the different kinds of stimuli--tone bursts, words and white noise. The BERA was performed using the filtered clicks as stimuli. We have found the responses to tone, verbal and noise stimuli in children with developmental dysarthria. The latency times were prolonged to verbal and noise stimuli. We did not find any responses to verbal and noise stimuli in children with developmental dysphasia. At the BERA investigation we did not find the auditory evoked brainstem responses in children with developmental dysarthria on the side of motoric innervation lesion. The latency times of waves N3 and N5 were prolonged in children with developmental dysphasia. The CERA and BERA seems to be a good differential diagnostic tool for differentiation between these two kinds of developmental speech disorders. The results confirmed also that there are the mixed forms of those developmental speech disorders.