Perfis comunicativos e desenvolvimento de tarefas para reabilitação discursiva pós-acidente vascular cerebral unilateral

Abstract

This thesis had the general aim at characterizing the communicative profiles of adults with acquired brain damage after a unilateral stroke, as well as to develop tasks for a communication rehabilitation program focusing on dicourse. This thesis was comprised of three studies, one theoretical and the two empirical. The first one was conducted by means of a systematic review in order to verify which approaches have been used in rehabilitation of communicative discursive processing in acquired neurological disorders. A search was performed in the PubMed database, between 2002 and 2012, with keywords for the constructs rehabilitation, neurological disorder, communication, and discursive abilities. Only four empirical studies were found. The second study was designed to identify changes in communicative processing due to unilateral stroke, describing how many and which the communicative clinical subgroups are, and to explore whether sociocultural, individual and clinical variables differ among communicative clusters. A hierarchical clusters was made based on the performance of verbal oral tasks of the Montreal Communication Assessment Battery brief version (Bateria Montreal da Comunicação versão breve) with a sample of 71 patients with ischemic stroke, 35 adults with right brain damage and 36 with left brain damage not followed by aphasia.Comparisons among clusters were made by Chi-square and One-Way ANOVA (post-hoc Bonferroni). Three communicative clusters were found: (1) discursive impairment (conversational speech), (2) deficit in pragmatic processing (interpreting speaking actions) and in lexical semantics (overt verbal fluency), and (3) spared performance, , without any differences regarding sociocultural, individual and clinical factors. The last empirical study aimed at presenting tasks development process for a discourse rehabilitation program. The sample was comprised of 39 participants distributed into 8 phases. The proposal of methodological flow for developing intervention tasks with the same methodological rigor used to develop evaluation paradigms may contribute to the field of rehabilitating complex communicative units. Findings of the three studies altogether suggest that although communication assessment had been growing, there still is a great demand for investigations regarding rehabilitation of conversational and general communicative impairments