Desempenho gramatical de crianças com desenvolvimento normal e com Distúrbio Específico de Linguagem

Abstract

Specific Language Impairment is a communication disorder that begins in early childhood and is characterized by the delay in both language acquisition and development. The aim of this Thesis was to characterize the grammatical performance of children with and without Specific Language Impairment based on a spontaneous speech sample. Seventy children, with ages ranging from 3.1 to 6.11 years and residing in the city of São Paulo, participated in this study. The participants were split into two groups: CG (control group) comprised 35 children with normal language development and RG (research group) comprised 35 children with Specific Language Impairment. This Thesis was divided into three studies. The results of Study 1 showed differences between the two groups regarding grammatical morphemes and mean length of utterance in morphemes and words. In Study 2, the results showed that the groups differed, in all ages, when analyzed by the perspective of the noun. For the remaining word classes, results were different between the groups only at 5-6 years. In Study 3 significant differences between the two groups were observed when the verbal morphology was analyzed. The conclusion is that subjects of the RG had worse performance than subjects of the CG, especially at 5-6 years of age, characterizing an important grammatical deficit for children with Specific Language Impairment.