Renata Mousinho

Consciência fonológica e o processo de aprendizagem de leitura e escrita: implicações teóricas para o embasamento da prática fonoaudiológica

TEMA: consciencia fonologica e o aprendizado da leitura e escrita. OBJETIVO: realizar uma revisao de literatura acerca do tema com o objetivo de retomar conceitos dispostos recentemente na literatura e oferecer ao Fonoaudiologo a possibilidade de revisao de suas praticas para (re)formulacao de estrategias terapeuticas. CONCLUSAO: e possivel observar que os estudos convergem para a importante relacao no desenvolvimento das habilidades de consciencia fonologica com o desenvolvimento da leitura e escrita. Tal fato reforca a necessidade de revisao de nossa pratica clinica e cientifica para a criacao e difusao de estrategias preventivas e/ou de remediacao envolvendo atividades ludicas que englobam a consciencia da crianca na manipulacao dos sons da fala. Uma importante area de pesquisa na Fonoaudiologia do Brasil deveria convergir para o estudo e criacao de ferramentas facilitadoras ao Fonoaudiologo.

Habilidades lingüístico-cognitivas em leitores e não-leitores

BACKGROUND investigation of linguistic and cognitive skills in readers and nonreaders. AIM to evaluate the performance of readers and nonreaders in tasks related to several linguistic and cognitive skills and to determine the implication of the results to the clinical practice and to eduaction. METHOD participants of the study were 35 children in the process of alphabetization. The children were given tasks designed to assess their cognitive and linguistic abilities. The group of nonreaders was composed by 20 children who did not read any of the words presented on a list of 24 items. The group of readers included 15 children who read nearly every word presented on the same list. RESULTS the group of readers presented a better performance on the following tasks: language development assessment; alphanumeric rapid automatized naming and working memory. There was a great variability in the performance of readers and nonreaders in the phonological awareness tasks. For the group of readers, syllabic judgment and segmentation tasks were considered easy or very easy; syllabic transposition and phonemic subtraction presented medium difficulty and phoneme identification was considered a difficult task. For the group of nonreaders, syllabic segmentation was considered an easy task; syllabic judgment presented medium difficulty, and syllabic transposition, phonemic subtraction and phoneme identification were considered very difficult. CONCLUSION the experience with reading influences the performance of children in linguistic and cognitive tasks. The performance of readers and nonreaders in the phonological awareness assessments indicates the importance of taking into account not only the required level of linguistic segmentation but also the cognitive level required by the nature of the task.

A computational approach for screening dyslexia

This paper aims to present a computational tool based on neural networks to detect people with possible learning disabilities (dyslexia). Participants were aged from nine to 18 years old with or without the diagnosis of dyslexia. Neural networks technique showed consistency in dealing with the problems of pattern recognition in the screening of dyslexia.

A Brazilian version of the "Children's Interview for Psychiatric Syndromes" (ChIPS)

OBJETIVE: The advance of research in child and adolescent psychiatry in Brazil heavily depends on the existence of instruments for the investigation of psychiatric syndromes adapted to Brazilian Portuguese. METHODS: This article describes a careful process of translation of the Childrens Interview for Psychiatric Syndromes for the purpose of use in research in Brazil. The Childrens Interview for Psychiatric Syndromes has a version for parents (P-ChIPs) and a version for children (ChIPS). In this article, the sections of P-ChIPS referring to attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, oppositional-defiant disorder, conduct disorder, mania/hypomania, anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa and psychotic disorders were translated to Brazilian Portuguese. The sections of the ChIPS referring to substance use disorders, social anxiety disorder, specific phobias, obsessive-compulsive disorder, generalized anxiety disoder, separation anxiety disorder, post-traumatic disorders and depression/dysthimia were also adapted. Each section was translated by two independent translators and later discussed in a committee composed of experts in the field of Psychiatry and a professional of the field of linguistics. RESULT: A final version containing an interview for the main psychiatric syndromes was defined. CONCLUSION: The translated P-ChIPS is a helpful instrument in children and adolescent clinical evaluation.

Redes neuronais e transtornos de aprendizagem: rastreio de pessoas com dislexia

In the presence of the actual world context, the importance of knowing the technological resources and making use of them to improve the performance of human activities is realized. Educat ion cannot be laid aside of this reality, on the contrary, it has to be allied and seek for resources to improve even more the process of teaching and learn ing through Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). Thus, the dof Araucaria/PR, through the Educational Technology Project, has pro vided access to these resources establishing informatics laboratories, ev aluating and reorganizing the used method, as an example, the accomplishment of the Leader-Teacher function related to the laboratory monitor one. Resumo. Diante do contexto do mundo atual, percebe-se a imp ortância de conhecer os recursos tecnologicos e fazer uso deste s para melhorar o desempenho das atividades humanas. A educacao nao pficar a margem desta realidade, ao contrario, deve buscar meios de aprimorar o processo de ensino e aprendizagem por meio das Tecnologias da I nformacao e Comunicacao (TICs). Assim, o municipio de Araucari a/PR, atraves do Projeto de Tecnologia Educacional, tem viabilizado o acesso a estes recursos com a implantacao de laboratorios de informatica, ae reorganizando os metodos empregados, como por exemplo, a implemen tacao da funcao de Professor-orientador em detrimento a funcao do moni tor de laboratorio.

Computational Neuroscience

Understanding the core function of the brain is one the major challenges of our times. In the areas of neuroscience and education, several new studies try to correlate the learning difficulties faced by children and youth with behavioral and social problems. This work aims to present the challenges and opportunities of computational neuroscience research, with the aim of detecting people with learning disorders. We present a line of investigation based on the key areas: neuroscience, cognitive sciences and computer science, which considers young people between nine and eighteen years of age, with or without a learning disorder. The adoption of neural networks reveals consistency in dealing with pattern recognition problems and they are shown to be effective for early detection in patients with these disorders. We argue that computational neuroscience can be used for identifying and analyzing young Brazilian people with several cognitive disorders.