Memória declarativa e linguagem em crianças Asperger: um estudo do processamento de palavras morfologicamente derivadas em eiro / eira no português brasileiro

Abstract

The present research aims to understand how the morphologically derived words in Brazilian Portuguese are processed in children with and without diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder or ASD, in order to obtain, through a behavioral comparative analysis of both groups, empirical data about the neural bases autism, their long-term memory systems and the functioning of their mental lexicon. Thus, we will try to reflect on the occurrence of the operational mechanisms of a declarative memory in high that indicate, according to Walenski et al (2007) and (2014) a work of procedural memory in défict and that, in turn, interfere in the processing of morphologically derived words. Therefore, the Ullman Declarative / Procedural Model (2003) was used as a research parameter in order to relate the concepts related to the characterization and functioning of Declarative Memory and Procedural Memory with the theoretical foundation about the study of the lexicon as well as such as the characterization within the morphological aspects of the words brought by Villalva et al (2014), Marin (1992), Camillo (2013), Juffs (2010) and cf. Levelt, Roelofs & Meyer in Ferrari-Neto (2014). All this with the permission of the theoretical contribution linked to the Research Methodology of Experimental Psycholinguistics that assists in the studies and analyzes of the reading processing and lexical decision in the subjects. Therefore, the research analyzed and compared the lexical processing of terminated eiro - eira words in children between 6 (six) and 10 (ten) years with and without ASD. Thus, we compared the processing patterns of the eiro-eira suffix in an online experiment, using the Morphological Priming technique, in a lexical decision task. This technique consists of presenting one word as PRIME and another as TARGET. The word that works as PRIME works as a facilitator or not of the word that comes next (TARGET). The children were also evaluated by accelerated decision to letter string on the computer screen: Do you consider this letter sequence a word in Portuguese Language? Katz et al (2011). The results obtained with the applied experiment pointed out that the autistic children were superior in relation to the reading time, which corresponds to the data revealed by Walenski et al. (2007) and (2014), regarding the possible deficit in procedural memory. However, regarding the Yes and No responses regarding word recognition, the children in the control group, who did not present any degree of autism, recognized more than the autistic children in the experimental group. The data also suggested that reading was facilitated for autistics in cases where the words Simple were in the target position in the experiment and the reaction time and recognition of the words could not be considered directly proportional, that is, for the autistic child whether or not to recognize the word does not mean that it will read faster. What it will mean for her, then, are many more questions concerning the presence or absence of the grammatical component represented by the suffixes of the derived words and which are processed by procedural memory. The data were analyzed using the coordinates of non-parametric statistics.