Luciana Mendonça Alves

A nomeação seriada rápida em escolares com e sem queixas de problemas de aprendizagem em escola pública e particular

OBJETIVO: investigar a nomeacao seriada rapida em criancas de uma escola publica e uma privada, com e sem queixas de problemas escolares. METODOS: participaram do estudo 137 criancas dos generos masculino e feminino, com idade entre 7 e 11 anos, da cidade de Belo Horizonte, matriculadas no ensino fundamental, entre o 2o e o 5o ano. Foi aplicado o Teste de Nomeacao Automatizada Rapida (Rapid Automatized Naming - RAN) que avaliou o tempo gasto pelo participante para nomear uma serie de estimulos visuais familiares: cores, letras, digitos e objetos - o mais rapido possivel. RESULTADOS: os resultados deste estudo evidenciaram que o desempenho de alunos de escola particular comparado ao de alunos de escola publica e superior e que ha uma diferenca estatisticamente significante entre sujeitos com queixas de problemas de aprendizagem comparado aos sem queixas. CCONCLUSAO: o presente estudo sinaliza que a capacidade de nomeacao seriada pode ser considerada como uma das habilidades fundamentais para o bom desempenho em leitura. Sendo assim, ha necessidade de continuidade de pesquisas que estabelecam a relacao dessa habilidade da linguagem com outras habilidades de leitura e escrita para verificacao do impacto direto da nomeacao seriada rapida no processo de aprendizagem da leitura.

Avaliação do vocabulário expressivo em crianças surdas usuárias da Língua Brasileira de Sinais

PURPOSE: to investigate the performance of deaf children users of the Brazilian Language of Signs in expressive vocabulary test. METHOD: the sample was composed by 64 subjects (32 children in the study group and 32 in the control group) that were divided in 4 groups by age (5, 6, 7 and 8-year old). All children were submitted to the Language Test for Young Children ABFW - Vocabulary. The answers were classified in designation of the usual word (DVU), no-designation (ND) and substitution process (PS), in agreement with the author’s of the test proposal. RESULTS: in most of the conceptual fields, the hearing loss group obtained worse performance in relation to the control group. It was verified that in both studied groups, the worst performance took place in the categories: places, food and clothes, in all ages. In both groups better performance was verified in the 5 year-old children, in comparison to the other children. Also in both studied groups, the substitution processes were observed with larger frequency in the field places and with smaller frequency in shapes and colors. There was no significant difference among the ages. CONCLUSION: the conceptual fields with higher success indexes in the deaf children users of the Brazilian Language of Signs were professions, toys and musical instruments and furniture and domestic utensils. In spite of the quantitative differences observed in relation to the groups, great qualitative similarity was observed in relation to the obtained answers, suggesting a similar evolutionary process in the lexical acquisition of the groups.

Aspectos prosódicos temporais da leitura de escolares com dislexia do desenvolvimento

PURPOSE: To analyze the temporal prosodic aspect in loud reading of students with and without dyslexia from the phonetic point of view through acoustic and perceptual evaluation, in order to identify differences in performance between the two types of readers that may point to particular characteristics of dyslexia. METHODS: Forty students from 3rd to 5th grades with ages ranging from nine to 14 years, ten dyslexic (clinical group) and 30 without any complaints of learning deficits (non-clinical group) were recorded during loud reading of a text. Data were perceptually and acoustically analyzed using the software WinPitch. The following measures were taken: pause duration and location, total speaking time, speaking rate, articulation time, and articulation rate. RESULTS: In comparison to the non-clinical group, the clinical group had a higher number of and longer pauses; their speaking and articulation rates indicated, respectively, a lower reading speed and slowness in the production of each articulatory gesture. CONCLUSION: The characteristics identified in reading processing by dyslexic children make the prosodic organization in text reading difficult.

Prosody and reading in dyslexic children.

This study investigates the role of prosody in the reading aloud of dyslexic children. Ten dyslexic and 30 non-dyslexic control children (mean age 9.5 and 9.9 years, respectively) were recorded when reading a text of appropriate level and subsequently asked to retell it and tested on its comprehension. The data were analysed acoustically by the WinPitchPro programme. The temporal and intonational processing of reading of the two groups were contrasted and revealed unusual characteristics of the dyslexic group with respect to what follows: (1) temporal processing (reduced speeds of reading and articulation and alterations in the number and duration of pauses); (2) variation of the fundamental frequency (limited ability to vary the melody at the phrasal and phonemic level); and (3) vowel stress patterning (difficulty in producing typical stress patterns, and of marking the pre-stressed and stressed syllables). Fulfilling its objective, the present study promotes advances in the understanding of the functioning of prosody in reading aloud in dyslexia.

Rapid Naming in Brazilian Students with Dyslexia and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder

Introduction: The effective development of reading and writing skills requires the concerted action of several abilities, one of which is phonological processing. One of the main components of phonological processing is rapid automatized naming (RAN)—the ability to identify and recognize a given item by the activation and concomitant articulation of its name. Objective: To assess the RAN performance of schoolchildren with dyslexia and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) compared with their peers. Methods: In total, 70 schoolchildren aged between 8 and 11 years participated in the study. Of these, 16 children had a multiprofessional diagnosis of ADHD while 14 were diagnosed with dyslexia. Matched with these groups, 40 schoolchildren with no history of developmental impairments were also evaluated. The RAN test was administered to assess the length of time required to name a series of familiar visual stimuli. The statistical analysis was conducted using measures of descriptive statistics and the 2-sample t-test at the 5% significance level. Results: The performance of the group with dyslexia was inferior to that of the control group in all tasks and the ADHD group had inferior performance for color and letters-naming tasks. The schoolchildren with dyslexia and those with ADHD showed very similar response times. Age was an important variable to be analyzed separately. As they aged, children with typical language development had fast answers on colors and digits tasks while children with dyslexia or ADHD did not show improvement with age. Conclusions: The schoolchildren with dyslexia took longer to complete all tasks and ADHD took longer to complete digits and objects tasks in comparison to their peers with typical development. This ability tended to improve with age, which was not the case, however, with schoolchildren who had ADHD or dyslexia.

Processamento fonológico em indivíduos com transtorno de Déficit de Atenção e Hiperatividade

Purpose to analyze e to describe the skills’ performance of the phonological processing components in subjects with Attention Deficit - Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Methods it is a descriptive analytical study of the evaluation data of the phonological processing skills of 45 subjects, with ages between 7 and 16 years, with a multiprofessional diagnosis of ADHD. All data was obtained from the medical records of the subjects evaluated by the Laboratorio de Estudo dos Transtornos de Aprendizagem (LETRA) of Hospital das Clinicas da Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG), between the years of 2008 and 2011. The analyzed results include the Phonological Awareness test, proposed by the battery of tests BELEC, the Rapid Serial Naming (RAN) test and Auditory Memory test. Two variables were considered in this analysis: the age and the presence or absence of associated comorbidities. The test used to the sample characterization was the nonparametric of Mann Whitney. Results groups tend to differentiate themselves when the age variable is analyzed, on the Phonological Awareness tests and RAN. When the comorbidity variable was analyzed, the Phonological Awareness was more influenced by the presence of comorbidities. On the Auditory Memory skills, by the same light, there were no differences between the groups. Conclusion the largest deficit in phonological processing was observed in phonological awareness skills, according to the age and comorbidity variables, followed by the lexicon’s access skills, according to the age variable. About the Working Memory, there was no significance.

Habilidades cognitivo-linguísticas e sua relação com características respiratórias

PURPOSE: to relate respiratory characteristics with cognitive-linguistic skills performance of children from a public school of the region of Belo Horizonte. METHOD: a cross-sectional, observational and descriptive study. From the 180 enrolled children, 131 met the inclusion and exclusion criteria. We evaluated 66 children in the 4th grade and 65 children in the 3rd grade of the elementary education, from both genders, with ages going between nine and ten year old. We utilized a questionnaire for assessment of respiratory characteristics and a previously published protocol and adapted to the Brazilian population in order to assess the cognitive-linguistic skills. Data were analyzed using the Mann-Whitney and Kruskal Wallis test at a significance level of 1%. RESULTS: there was not observed a p-value <0.01 in comparison between the respiratory characteristics and the cognitive-linguistic skills’ score obtained by each series. We observed that 59.1% of students had scores in a questionnaire for assessment of respiratory characteristics between zero and four points, indicating some impairment in respiratory variables studied. We obtained a significant p value for comparisons between the performance in cognitive-linguistic skills and the presence of respiratory disorders in the studied series. CONCLUSION: no significant relationship was found between the performance of cognitive-linguistic skills and the presence of respiratory characteristics in students from the same public school of Belo Horizonte city, and the children who showed respiratory changes didn´t have performance below those without these changes in the assessed skills.

Parâmetros prosódicos de leitura em escolares do segundo ao quinto ano do ensino fundamental

Purpose Characterize and compare melodic variation and reading speed and verify their evolution throughout the development of schooling. Methods The reading of 78 Elementary School (2nd to 5th grade) students was analyzed using the Praat program with regards to the parameters of melodic variation (F0) and reading speed (Duration). Statistical measures (mean and standard deviation) were taken and the Student´s t-test was applied at significance level of 5%. Results Melodic variation and reading speed increased as schooling progressed, especially during 5th grade. Conclusion Melodic variation increases as schooling progresses, mainly during 5th grade. First minute of reading analysis is sufficient to assess reading speed, not being necessary to analyze the full text.

Dificuldades enfrentadas por universitários: um olhar fonoaudiológico

Objetivo: Identificar as queixas fonoaudiologicas de aprendizagem, audicao e expressividade incidentes em estudantes universitarios. Metodos: Estudo descritivo transversal com universitarios do Curso de Graduacao em Fonoaudiologia de uma Instituicao de Ensino Superior de Belo Horizonte. Foram analisados de 80 questionarios respondidos individualmente. Resultados: Os resultados evidenciaram a predominância do genero feminino na populacao estudada . Quanto as habilidades auditivas, a queixa mais significativa foi a dificuldade em estudar/concentrar em ambiente ruidoso relatado por 64 individuos. Dentre as dificuldades de aprendizagem pesquisadas, a dificuldade de acompanhar textos grandes foi a mais expressiva, presente em 46 dos individuos. Em relacao a expressividade, a grande queixa foi a dificuldade de falar em publico, relatada por 64 individuos, seguida pela dificuldade em organizar as palavras e ideias quando quer expor algo, presente em 48 individuos. Conclusao: Os universitarios pesquisados apresentam queixas que podem vir a prejudicar o desempenho academico. A pesquisa mostra a importância em se viabilizar a atuacao fonoaudiologica junto a esta populacao a fim de minimizar a ocorrencia destas dificuldades, colaborando assim para a formacao de profissionais mais capacitados e eficientes.

Mapeamento da fonoaudiologia educacional no Brasil : formação, trabalho e experiência profissional

Purpose To map the profile of Brazilian Speech Therapists who report acting in Educational Speech Therapy, with regard to aspects related to training, performance and professional experience. Methods Retrospective study, based on secondary database analysis of the Federal Council of Hearing and Speech Sciences on the questionnaires reporting acting with Educational Environment. Results 312 questionnaires were completed, of which 93.3% by women aged 30-39 years. Most Speech Therapists continued the studies, opting mostly for specialization. Almost 50% of respondents, have worked for less than six years with the speciality, most significantly in the public service (especially municipal) and private area. Conclusion The profile of the Speech Therapists active in the Educational area in Brazil is a professional predominantly female, who values to continue their studies after graduation, looking mostly for specialization in the following areas: Audiology and Orofacial Motor. The time experience of the majority is up to 10 years of work whose nature is divided mainly in public (municipal) and private schools. The performance of Speech Therapists in the Educational area concentrates in Elementary and Primary school, with varied workload.