Passages used in the assessment of Chilean adults with neurological speech disorders

Introduction: Oral reading passages are often used in the assessment of adults with neurological speech disorders. These passages must incorporate phonetic aspects representative of the language, that is, they must be phonetically balanced. El abueloand La familia are the passages used in Chile, even when there is no evidence on their phonetic balance. Objective: To determine the phonetic balance of the passages used in the assessment of Chilean adults with neurological speech disorders, based on the frequency of phonemes in Chilean Spanish. Materials and methods: Quantitative non-experimental descriptive study. The frequency of occurrence of each phoneme in El abuelo and La familia is identified and is compared with the frequency distribution of Chilean Spanish. Results: The frequency distribution of the phonemes shows statistically significant differences between the study by Pérez and El abuelo (χ² = 34.983; P = .028), and between the study by Pérez and La familia (χ² = 54.402; P < .001). Conclusions: El abuelo and La familia are passages which are not phonetically balanced. Despite being composed of the entire phonological inventory of the language, phonemes are not distributed with a frequency similar to that reported for Chile. The need arises to have phonetically balanced passages that include phonetic aspects of Chilean Spanish for the evaluation of neurological speech disorders.