Clustering e switching na fluência verbal infantil : idade, tipo de escola e TDAH

Abstract

Child neuropsychology has grown in Brazil with the publication of instruments adapted and standardized for this population, and the development of intervention programs for both clinical and school settings. The objective was to contribute to the national and international literature regarding the use of qualitative analysis in addition to quantitative already commonly used in verbal fluency tasks (TFV). For this, 516 children (484 healthy and 32 with ADHD) were evaluated with the unconstrained, phonemic-orthographic and semantics modalities of verbal fluency. In addition to the raw scores of trial and error, there was clustering and switching analysis investigating the roles age, type of school and ADHD in this processing. In general age effects were seen in the total of correct words, switches, semantic and phonemic clusters in the three modalities. In all cases, older children performed better than the younger children. It is noteworthy the strong correlations between production switches and total words in TFV. On the other hand, were not observed effects of age and school type in the size of clusters. As the evolution of performance over time, it is observed decrease in the last the blocks of task in all age groups and in the ADHD group. Comparing ADHD and controls, we present results indicating differences mainly in the way the groups are organized over time to achieve the purpose of the task. The default output switches, and hence of words over time is shown for various clinical and control groups. While in healthy children observed the drop in performance in the last task blocks, in children with ADHD occurs slight rise in the number of switches, which seems so contribute to retrieve words. The results of this study confirm the important role of executive functions in performing TFV to demonstrate that differences between groups occurring in the total scores of the task (both clinical and age) may occur due to the strategies that each group uses to carry them out. Thus, it is suggested that studies analyzing clustering and switching continue to be made in both research and in neuropsychological clinic.