Influência da memória de trabalho na compreensão leitora de estudantes universitários com TDAH

Abstract

Attention Deficit / Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder, which has language disorders as comorbidities. Increasingly, complaints of reading comprehension difficulties have been common in adults with this disorder. In view of this, the general objective for this dissertation was to analyze how the reading process occurs in university students with ADHD, aged between 21 and 36 years. The specific objectives, on the other hand, tried to a) check if the impairments in reading comprehension are preponderant of ADHD; b) to investigate the influence of working memory on the reading comprehension of participants with ADHD; c) compare the speed of performance of the lexical decision task between the participants of the experimental group (with ADHD) and the control group (without ADHD). We assume as hypotheses: The impairment in the reading process in university students with ADHD is also due to the low capacity of working memory; University students with this disorder may experience a greater slowness of the lexical decision task when compared to those who do not have ADHD. To verify this, we applied three instruments: Cloze, the Task for Linguistic Attention (TAL) and the Reading Span Test-Português Brasileiro (RST-PB). Participated in this study, 15 university students diagnosed with ADHD (Experimental group), 4 female and 11 male, average age of 24 to 6 m from the general group, and 15 university students without the referred disorder (Control Group), being 4 females and 11 males, mean age 22, 9m from the general group. We used Cloze to check the reading comprehension of the participants. The results of this test indicated that the performance of the participants in the SG was lower compared to the CG. This revealed that participants with ADHD have difficulty reading comprehension. In Linguistic Care, the SG had a significantly lower result compared to the CG and demanded more time in decision making. This result confirmed the hypothesis we adopted that university students with ADHD have a greater slowness of the lexical decision task. In the Reading Span Test, the SG presented a memory span lower than the CG, also confirming the hypothesis that the impairment of reading ability in adults with ADHD is also due to the low capacity of TM. Analyzing the three applied experiments, we could see that the TM capacity of the participants with ADHD measured in the RST was reduced and this influenced the reading comprehension. However, the ability of TM was not a determining factor in the performance of the reading process, but linguistic attention. This can be justified because the reading process requires a greater demand for sustaining attention for the emergence of understanding the content read. This is more costly for college students with ADHD due to the flaws they have in executive control.