O funcionamento da atenção conjunta na interação mãe-criança cega

Abstract

This research has as main objective to understand the functioning of joint attention in mother-blind child interaction. For this, we conducted a longitudinal investigation, whose corpus was composed of videotaped records, with an average of fifteen to thirty minutes of occurred daily situations (free play, bath time, feeding, etc.) with that dyad in the home environment and a period of approximately one year. We selected eighteen out of these situations for review in order to monitor qualitative changes in scenes of joint attention established between mother and her blind son during this period. We based our study in view of the multimodal language functioning proposed by Kendon (1980, 2002, 2004), McNeill (1985, 1992, 2000), Butcher, Goldin-Meadow (2000) and Cavalcante (2009). In our theoretical path, we went on by contributions of joint attention, by discussions on the prosody and the roles of gestures in the mother-child interaction, and by a few descriptions of the effects of blindness in the process of joint attention. We started from the hypothesis that the scenes of joint attention are privileged moments to enter the child at the language; that such scenes are structured by multimodal language settings in the mother-blind child interaction, in which the voice/speech and touch are the main constituents of joint attention; that the prosody/motherese speech mother works as an access of blind children in these scenes; and the touch that has the status of the look in the operation of that child s joint attention. Our data showed that cases of child engagement in the interaction of joint attention with the mother contributed to the verbal acquisition of child; that this operation involved the integration of multimodal maternal and child elements, including maternal speech with prosodic markings and the touch were paramount in establishment of joint attention in the interaction with the child; in this process the voice quality in falsetto present in the motherese was the key to engage the child in this interaction, in which the child touch played an important role to replace the status of the look. These findings confirm our thesis that functioning in children with blindness occurs with the inclusion of touch and voice/speech, which serve as primary resources for their inclusion in the language. We hope these findings encourage reflection to think about alternative ways to engage the blind child in scenes of joint attention, contributing to language acquisition.