Patrícia Aparecida Zuanetti

Comparação dos erros ortográficos de alunos com desempenho inferior em escrita e alunos com desempenho médio nesta habilidade

PURPOSE: The aim of this study was to verify whether children with poor writing performances make more orthographic mistakes than children of the same school grade with average performances, and what are the most frequent types of orthographic mistakes. METHODS: Twenty-four second grade children from a public school were individually analyzed in this study. The test used was the writing subtest of the School Performance Test, which is composed by 34 words that are dictated to the students. RESULTS: Students with lower performances had significantly more orthographic mistakes than the group of children with average writing performances. The mistakes that were statistically different between children of the two groups were: hypercorrection mistakes, difficulties with nasal markers, irregular phonographemic relation, syllable omission, and letter changes. There was also a strongly negative correlation between orthographic mistakes and writing performance. CONCLUSION: The results showed that the better the writing performance, the lesser the orthographic mistakes made by the subjects. The most frequent mistakes made by children with poor writing skills were: irregular phonographemic relation, syllable omission, difficulties with nasal markers, hypercorrection errors and letter changes. These types of mistakes were different from the average student; however, the orthographic performance tends to improve with the improvement of the childrens learning capacity.

Aspectos perinatais, cognitivos e sociais e suas relações com as dificuldades de aprendizagem

PURPOSE: the main purpose of this study is to analyze the social, cognition and perinatal aspects that increase the risk of a child in reading, writing or arithmetic alterations. METHOD: we analyzed 45 children (about 8.3 year old), in average, and observed their reading, writing, arithmetic, phonological awareness, memory and auditory processing skills. In addition, the childrens parents answered a questionnaire about the childs gestation, birth, life and social aspects. In order to check the relationship among the independent and dependent variables (reading, writing, arithmetic), we used the logistic regression. RESULTS: we observed that alterations in phonological awareness increase the risk of a child in reading (OD = 42; p-value 0.02), writing (OD = 10.8; p-value 0.01) or arithmetic (OD = 42; p-value 0.002) alterations. Alterations in phonological memory increase the risk of a child in reading (OD = 24; p-value 0.04) or arithmetic (OD = 42; p-value 0.04). In the study we also observed that high education level of childrens mother reduce the risk for childrens school problems (OD = 0,3; p-value > 0.001) and mothers low level education (OD = 2.3; p-value > 0.001) affect the childrens reading. The weight in birth or prematurity is not related with school performance. CONCLUSIONS: children who have phonological awareness and phonological memory alterations or children who also have low education level mothers have increased the risk as for learning problems.

Audiometric thresholds and auditory processing in children with early malnutrition: a retrospective cohort study

CONTEXT AND OBJECTIVE Malnutrition is one of the causes of changes in cell metabolism. The inner ear has few energy reserves and high metabolism. The aim of this study was to analyze whether malnutrition at an early age is related to impairment of auditory processing abilities and hearing abnormalities. DESIGN AND SETTING Retrospective cohort study conducted in a tertiary public hospital. METHODS 45 children participated, divided as follows: G1, children diagnosed with malnutrition in their first two years of life; G2, children without history of malnutrition but with learning difficulties; G3, children without history of malnutrition and without learning difficulties. Tympanometry, pure-tone audiometry and the Staggered Spondaic Word (SSW) test (auditory processing) were performed. Statistical inferences were made using the Kruskal-Wallis test (α = 5%) and the test of equality of proportions between two samples (α = 1.7%). RESULTS None of the 45 children participating in this study presented hearing deficiencies. However, at six of the eight frequencies analyzed, the children in G1 presented hearing thresholds lower than those of the other groups. In the auditory processing evaluation test, it was observed that 100% of the children in G1 presented abnormal auditory processing and that G1 and G2 had similar proportions of abnormalities (P-values: G1/G2 = 0.1; G1/G3 > 0.001; G2/G3 = 0.008). CONCLUSIONS Malnutrition at an early age caused lowering of the hearing levels, although this impairment could not be considered to be a hearing deficiency. Every child in this group presented abnormalities in auditory processing abilities.

Characteristics of the emissive prosody of children with autism spectrum disorder

Corresponding address: Patrícia Aparecida Zuanetti HCRP – USP/CEOF – Centro Especializado de Otorrinolaringologia e Fonoaudiologia Avenida Bandeirantes, 3900 CEP: 14048-900 – Ribeirão Preto, São Paulo, Brasil E-mail: pati_zua@yahoo.com.br ABSTRACT Objective: to analyze the prosodic aspects of speech in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder. Methods: 21 children aged 3 to 6 years participated and were divided into three groups: Group 1 – children with Autism Spectrum Disorder; Group 2 – children with language delay; Group 3 – children with typical language development. Three judges performed a subjective evaluation of the emissive prosody (characterization of pitch, loudness, sentence stress, stressed syllable and others) of the children during interaction time (video recording and use of specific protocols). The equality of proportions test was applied for group comparison (α=0.01). Results: the prevalence of a history of delay for speaking the first words was high in Groups 1 and 2. Regarding the prosodic characteristics, all Group 1 children had difficulties in the use of the stressed syllable, and some in the accentuation of the sentence. On the other hand, no Group 3 children showed these changes and few Group 2 children presented excessively stressed syllable. Conclusion: inappropriate stressing of words seems to be one of the features in the differential diagnosis of verbal children with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Hospital cognitive screening of patients with no related complaints

Mailing Address: Raphaela Barroso Guedes-Granzotti Departamento de Fonoaudiologia Rua Laudelino Freire, no 184, 2o andar Centro, Lagarto, Sergipe, Brasil CEP: 49000-000 E-mail: raphaelabgg@gmail.com ABSTRACT Purposes: to characterize the cognitive performance hospitalized adults and elderly patients with no complaints, check the effect of education and age and correlate the results. Methods: cognitive screening was carried out by the Mini Mental State Examination (MEM) and the Verbal Fluency Test, semantics (FVS) and phonological (FVF) in 25 adults and elderly with no cognitive changes complaints admitted in an internal medicine ward. For statistical analyses, the one-way Anova, followed by post hoc Tukey, the bivariate Person correlation and the nonparametric Fisher’s tests were used. Results: a high frequency of cognitive impairment and a moderate correlation among the three tests applied were verified. The educational factor influenced the results of the MEM, the FVF and FVS tests, while the age factor significantly influenced the evidence of MEM and FVS. Conclusion: the data demonstrated that cognitive screening in hospitalized patients without related complaints is important, and that age and education are paramount factors in cognitive performance.

Relação entre o desempenho em aritmética e a memória de trabalho fonológica em crianças

Purpose To compare the results of Loop Phonological Working Memory (LPWM) in children without global learning alterations, with lower and average/higher arithmetic performance. Methods The study was conducted with 30 children, between the ages of seven and nine years old, who attended the second or third grade of elementary school in the public network. Exclusion criteria were children with suggestive signs of hearing loss, neurological disorders, poor performance in the reading comprehension test or in speech therapy. The children included in the study were submitted to the subtest of arithmetic of Academic Achievement Test for division into two groups (G1 and G2). The G1 was composed of children with low performance in arithmetic and G2 for children with average/higher performance in arithmetic. All children were submitted to PWM assessment through the repetition of pseudowords test. Statistical analysis was performed using the Mann-Whitney test and a p-value <0.05 was considered significant. Results The study included 20 girls and 10 boys, mean age 8.7 years. The G1 was composed of 17 children and G2 of 13 children. There was a statistically significant difference between the groups studied for the repetition of pseudowords with three and four syllables. Conclusion The results of this study provide support for the hypothesis that changes in phonological working memory are related to difficulties in arithmetic tests.

Principais alterações encontradas nas narrativas escritas de crianças com dificuldades em leitura/escrita

Objetivo: analisar as producoes escritas de criancas com dificuldades em leitura/escrita. Metodos: 171 criancas, matriculadas no 4o/5o do ensino fundamental constituiram dois grupos: G1 (n=50) - criancas sem dificuldades em leitura/escrita, G2 (n=121) - criancas com dificuldades nessas tarefas. Cada crianca, apos observar uma figura estimulo, deveria escrever um texto. Foi analisado a grafia, os erros ortograficos, as variaveis linguisticas e o conteudo deste. Resultados: em G2 observou-se alteracoes em relacao a grafia; maior percentual de ocorrencia de erros ortograficos e de diversos tipos; mesma proporcao no uso de substantivos, adjetivos e pronomes, porem dificuldade na conjugacao verbal e no uso de adverbios temporais. Em relacao ao conteudo, apenas descreveram a cena e demonstraram vocabulario restrito e pouca criatividade. Conclusao: a producao escrita de criancas com dificuldade em leitura/escrita apresentou diversas falhas entre as quais: alteracoes na grafia, presenca de erros ortograficos e limitacao na construcao de texto, restringindo-se a simples descricao do desenho estimulo, com pouca articulacao de ideias e sem criacao de personagens, local e tempo para a sua historia. Este conjunto de falhas compromete a inteligibilidade do texto pelo leitor e demonstra que a elaboracao escrita e uma tarefa complexa para essas criancas.