Revista Ciência em Extensão (Aug 2013)
Cognitive-behavioral intervention for children with psycholinguistic difficulty: neuropsychological rehabilitation
Abstract
Children with delayed development of language functions can have difficulty reading and writing. Social problems can exacerbate situations of failure, while access to specialized services for the reduction or elimination of these difficulties is restricted, and costly for low-income families. The aim of the present study was therefore to develop and offer a program of cognitive-behavioral intervention to children in a public school, in order to stimulate changes in lexical processing, and determine its effectiveness in reducing deficiencies. After a meeting at the school, and with parental consent, 40 children were evaluated, considering the phonological, lexical, and semantic aspects of language, using the Neuropsychological Lexical Processing Assessment Set. Five children, aged six to 10 years, with performance below expectations for their age in some of the tasks, were included in the stimulation program. The children were invited to participate in an intervention, which comprised the second stage of the project. In the intervention, the children were subjected to a psycholinguistics stimulation program consisting of tasks aimed at stimulating functions that were mainly related to the performance of reading and writing. The data were analyzed using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences. A descriptive statistical analysis was first used to identify those children that were below the standard deviation of the first tasks in the assessment set, and the analysis was repeated after reassessment of the children following the intervention activities. The comparative statistical results demonstrated the effect of the psycholinguistic program. Gains in the interest and participation of the children in the school activities were also observed by teachers.
