Consciência fonológica e habilidades de escrita em indivíduos com síndrome de Down : um estudo longitudinal

• Ano de defesa: 2014
• Autor(a) principal: Pinto, Bárbara de Lavra
• Orientador(a): Scherer, Lilian Cristine
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: por
• Instituição de defesa: Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul
• Programa de Pós-Graduação: Programa de Pós-Graduação em Letras
• Departamento: Faculdade de Letras
• País: BR
• Palavras-chave em Português: LINGUÍSTICA APLICADA; FONOLOGIA; ESCRITA - APRENDIZAGEM; SÍNDROME DE DOWN
• Área do conhecimento CNPq: CNPQ::LINGUISTICA, LETRAS E ARTES::LETRAS
• Link de acesso: http://tede2.pucrs.br/tede2/handle/tede/2205

Topic: Phonological awareness (PA) and writing skills in Down syndrome (DS). Aims: 1. To verify that individuals with DS present development in writing learning and PA task performance in a period of four years and six months; 2. to identify what PA skills have evolved and if some of them have remained unchanged; 3. to analyze the nature of the relationship between PA and writing learning in individuals with DS; 4. to investigate, in participants with DS, the influence of verbal short-term memory (VSTM) in PA and writing skills from two perspectives, a longitudinal and a transversal one; 5. to compare the performance of DS participants to children with typical development (TD) matched for measures of expressive vocabulary in PA, writing and VSTM tasks. Material and Method: The sample of DS participants consisted of ten subjects (mean age: 14 years and 5 months), who were evaluated for PA, VSTM and writing skills in 2008 (Time 1) and 2012 (Time 2). Eighteen children with TD (mean age: 7 years and 8 months) participated in this study (Time 2). The VSTM of DS participants was assessed by repeating words in two moments. A pseudoword repetition test was applied to the two groups only at Time 2. Results: DS participants generally showed significant improvement in writing (words and sentence) and PA skills. In spite of significant advances in general scores in the PA test, it was observed that, in some tasks, such as syllable synthesis and segmentation, rhyme production, phoneme segmentation and transposition, the development of individuals with DS remained unchanged. While tasks such as syllable synthesis and segmentation can be performed with ease regardless of contact with the formal teaching of alphabetic writing, those requiring isolation and manipulation of phonemes are complex and may involve other capabilities beyond phonological processing. In this study, it was observed that the changes in writing and PA of DS participants occurred concomitantly. It was also virified that small progresses in the VSTM of DS participants had a significant influence on the advances in PA and writing learning. In a cross-sectional analysis at Time 2, the performance of individuals with DS in a test of pseudoword sequence repetition was observed to significantly correlate with writing words and pseudowords, as with all general scores in the PA test. DS participants in this study showed a significantly lower performance than TD controls in PA and VSTM tasks, even when the matching criterion was verbal mental age (VMA). There was no difference in the writing of words and pseudowords. Final Considerations: Our results suggest that the reciprocal relationship between PA and learning of written language can also be true for individuals with DS. It is possible that VSTM influences the learning of written language indirectly, with language skills, like the acquisition of vocabulary, by serving as a mediator of the relationship between variables. It was observed that, while the writing of words could be found within the expected, considering verbal cognitive abilities, PA and VSTM skills may be less developed in individuals with DS than what could be predicted by VMA. It is noteworthy that the profile variability related to writing, PA and VSTM found in participants with DS may reduce possible restrictions imposed by sample size of our sample.