Análise das habilidades preditoras de leitura em crianças com dificuldade de aprendizagem

Abstract

Learning written language involves a series of prior skills. Among these, the development of oral language, exposure to written material, knowledge of letters and phonological processing. In Brazil, there is a high number of children and adolescents who suffer from problems learning to read, especially in the Northeast region. Phonological processing refers to the ability to process phonological information when using oral and written language, and involves three skills: phonological awareness, quick access to the mental lexicon and phonological working memory. In this sense, this thesis aimed to investigate the relationship between vocabulary performance, phonological processing and reading in children and adolescents with learning complaints. The present research is an observational, descriptive and cross-sectional, quantitative-qualitative study, in which 17 children or adolescents with complaints about reading and writing learning performance between 7 and 15 years old participated. Participants were referred from the child psychiatry or neuropediatrics outpatient clinic for speech therapy evaluation. The following tests were used to develop the study: Teste Infantil de Nomeação (TIN), Teste de Vocabulário por Figuras USP (TVfusp), Teste de Consciência Fonológica – Instrumento de Avaliação Sequencial (CONFIAS), Prova de Memória de Trabalho Fonológica - Não palavras e Dígitos, teste de nomeação automática rápida (TENA), teste avaliação de leitura de palavras e pseudopalavras isoladas (LPI).To analyze the data, statistical analyzes and tests were carried out to understand the relationship between them. The results found very low performance in the reading test and there was a significant difference in relation to phonological awareness – phonemic level. Furthermore, regarding the levels of reading performance of words and pseudowords (p=0.019), the majority of children with reading deficits performed below expectations in terms of phonological awareness skills. In addition to reading, phonological awareness was also related to receptive vocabulary and phonological working memory, that is, the better the phonological awareness, the better the vocabulary and phonological working memory performance. Vocabulary also demonstrated an influence on reading performance, that is, participants with low expressive vocabulary achieved the worst performances in the reading test. The ability assessed with the worst performance was phonological working memory, which also demonstrated a correlation with reading performance. Performance in the rapid automatic naming task was a predictor for reading performance, therefore, the better the performance in the rapid automatic naming task, the better the performance in the reading test. Given the findings, the reading of children and adolescents with learning complaints demonstrated a relationship with predictors of written language, more specifically vocabulary and phonological processing. There is also a relationship of mutual development between these aspects, demonstrated through statistical results. The study highlights the interrelationship between phonological processing skills and vocabulary in reading performance in children and adolescents with learning difficulties and highlights the importance of investigating and stimulating these skills.