Alterações fonológicas e motoras na dislexia de desenvolvimento

Abstract

Dyslexia is a difficulty to acquire fluent reading and writing and the causes of this deficit are the object of an intense research. Some of the aspects of the deficit stem from impairment in phonological, motor and visual processing. Through the assessment of these impairments,the core reading deficit can be better understood and new clinical and teaching approaches developed. One of the ways to assess the cognitive processes involved in reading is through register of eye movements during reading since it offers us precise measures like number of fixations and gaze duration. This study aims to assess phonological, motor and reading skills of dyslexic children and normal readers. We assessed 10 children diagnosed for dyslexia and 10 controls with normal readings skills. Controls were matched for sex, age, and school grade. All the children completed a large set of assessment tasks: the Phonological Awareness Test, Perdue Pegboard Test, Eye Pursuit Task, Predictive Saccade Task, Word, Non-real Word and Syllable Reading Task. The result showed impairment for the dyslexic children in all of three assessed skills. In the Phonological Awareness Test, a lower score was found for the syllable and phoneme manipulation. In the motor tasks, a different pattern of eye movement was registered for the leftward saccades, but no differences were observed for the Perdue Pegboard Test. In the reading task, dyslexic children showed longer gaze time and more fixations on each word. No interaction was found for group and characteristics of the stimuli, such as frequency, length and regularity of the words. This indicates that in reading, the eye movements pattern of dyslexic children is similar to the controls. The results showed a presence of phonological and motor deficit in dyslexic children. Further studies are necessary to investigate the correlation of phonological and motor deficit and its specificity for dyslexia.