In order to assist on the functional assessment of swallowing, most speech therapists make use of instrumental resources such as cervical auscultation. Thus, the objective of this study was to search the literature in order to find the contribution of cervical auscultation for assessing dysphagias. To this end, international and national journals were reviewed. These journals were indexed in Springer, Lilacs, Bireme, Medline and Scielo databases, comprising the period between 1992 and 2011. From the analysis of the studies, it was possible to verify that: cervical auscultation has been modernized with the technologic evolution, enabling the realization of quantitative studies of the swallowing sounds; there are still few clear evidence of the connections between the sound components of swallowing and the physiological events of the pharyngeal phase; no differences were observed between the swallowing sounds in children and adults; in some studies, cervical auscultation was positively correlated with the videofluoroscopic assessment of swallowing, and others presented positive correlation between these two assessment procedures. Hence, considering that the swallowing videofluoroscopy examination is still difficult to access, with relatively high cost, it is believed that cervical auscultation constitutes an important resource for the diagnosis and clinical monitoring in cases of oropharyngeal dysphagia.