Teste de não-palavras para afásicos: uma contribuição para a prática fonoaudiológica

Abstract

Aphasia can be defined as a change in content, form and use of language and its underlying cognitive processes such as perception and memory acquired by neurological injury. This change is characterized by reduction and dysfunction, manifested in both the receptive and expressive aspect of oral and written language, though in varying degrees in each of these modalities (CHAPEY 1996). The phonological loop is one of the three components of the model of working memory proposed by Baddeley and Hitch (1974) and its function is to temporarily store the verbal information and retain it for a brief period in order to understand how to repeat verbal acoustics. According to Gathercole and Baddeley (1993), the task of non-words repetition is able to request more phonological memory, since the fact that the input is unknown, and not exposed to the influences lexical or the use of mnemonic strategies, possible to evaluate the actual conditions of the memory system. Considering that aphasics have difficulties to memorize words, phrases or statements and the lack of national studies that verify the performance of aphasics in a test of non-words, this dissertation aims to verify the integrity of the phonological loop by means of six aphasic applying a test of nonwords prepared for that purpose. As a result, it was observed throughout the analysis performances, but with a significant decline in performance influenced by the increase in word length, thus corroborating with previous studies with other types of language disorders