Social cognitive performance and different communication settings in groups of children with different disorders.

Purpose: To investigate the social-cognitive performance of children with diagnostics of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), mental disability (MD) and hearing impairment (HI) in two different communicative situations.

Methods: Participated in this study 30 children ages between 3 and 12 years starting speech language therapy processes, divided in three groups: Group 1 - ten children with diagnoses included in the Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD); Group 2: ten children diagnosed with mental disabilities (MD) and Group 3: ten children diagnosed with hearing impairment (HI). The subjects were assessed in two different communicative situations (group and individual therapy situation) for 12 months.

Results: Data regarding the performance of the three groups in the two situations show that G3 had better absolute performance when compared with other groups, with the variable symbolic play as an important differential criterion for the three groups.

Conclusion: We conclude that the social-cognitive performance can be used as an auxiliary tool for intervention, helping the identification of variables that could interfere in the communicative performance.