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| Author(s): |
Marina Leite Puglisi
Total Authors: 1
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| Document type: | Doctoral Thesis |
| Press: | São Paulo. |
| Institution: | Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Medicina (FM/SBD) |
| Defense date: | 2010-04-07 |
| Examining board members: |
Debora Maria Befi Lopes;
Brasília Maria Chiari;
Suelly Cecilia Olivan Limongi;
Jacy Perissinoto;
Haydée Fiszbein Wertzner
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| Advisor: | Debora Maria Befi Lopes |
| Abstract | |
INTRODUCTION: Sentence comprehension tasks require high linguistic processing demands and constitute an useful tool for investigating differences between various groups of children. The aim of this thesis was to verify the existence of crosslinguistic, socio-economic and Specific Language Impairments (SLI) effects on young childrens sentence comprehension abilities. METHODS: Participated on this study 269 children aged 4 to 6 years-old, divided into four groups: 1) Brazilian children from state schools; 2) Brazilian children from private schools; 3) English children from state schools; and 4) Brazilian SLI children from state schools. The sentences used in this study required the comprehension of two linguistic variables: word order and the number grammatical morpheme. RESULTS: The socioeconomic effect consisted on a significant difficulty in processing number morphological information. There was a small crosslinguistic effect, particularly related to word order comprehension. The main difference between groups was found for SLI children: while the youngest group showed atypical patterns of response, the oldest one performed similarly to younger children within normal language development, from low socioeconomic status. CONCLUSIONS: The findings indicated that 4- to 6-yearold childrens performance on this sentence comprehension test varied regarding group, demonstrating socio-economic, crosslinguistic (although in less extent) and SLIs effects. This test was particularly useful to discriminate between SLI and normally developing children, contributing to differential diagnosis. (AU) | |