Postural control and automaticity in dyslexic children: The relationship between visual information and body sway

Difficulty with literacy acquisition is only one of the symptoms of developmental dyslexia. Dyslexic children also show poor motor coordination and postural control. Those problems could be associated with automaticity, i.e., difficulty in performing a task without dispending a fair amount of conscious efforts. If this is the case, dyslexic children would show difficulties in using "unperceived" sensory cues to control body sway. Therefore, the aim of the study was to examine postural control performance and the coupling between visual information and body sway in dyslexic children. Ten dyslexic children and 10 non-dyslexic children stood upright inside a moving room that remained stationary or oscillated back and forward at frequencies of 0.2 or 0.5 Hz. Body sway magnitude and the relationship between the room's movement and body sway were examined. The results indicated that dyslexic children oscillated more than non-dyslexic children in both stationary and oscillating conditions. Visual manipulation induced body sway in all children but the coupling between visual information and body sway was weaker and more variable in dyslexic children. Based upon these results, we can suggest that dyslexic children use visual information to postural control with the same underlying processes as non-dyslexic children; however, dyslexic children show poorer performance and more variability while relating visual information and motor action even in a task that does not require an active cognitive and conscious motor involvement, which may be a further evidence of automaticity problem. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Instrumentalização pedagógica para avaliação de crianças com risco de dislexia

Pós-graduação em Educação - FFC

Formação de professores: o computador como recurso para o processo de alfabetização

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

O desenvolvimento da consciência fonêmica e a aquisição do princípio alfabético

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)

Alfabetização: o texto e o contexto

This paper is the result of a research about literacy concept from official documents, dictionaries and linguists. As an expansion of literacy concept was observed through last century, this investigation searched for an opposite way, in other words, a contraction of the literacy concept in order to clarify its nature and this way to be the starting point for literacy teachers. The best way to literacy happens was also part of the research, then the text was considered like that, since it is a real communicative situation. Besides it should be a meaning system which can be accessed again any time. It would include many kinds of texts – oral or written – as long as they were recorded somehow. The best text form was investigated as well, in other words, the best speech genre for teaching literacy, once there are important elements which should be considered during the literacy acquisition, such as the encouragement to read and to think about the correct writing of the words. In the end, considerations were made concerning the literacy teacher‘s awareness about the context change when the text is used in a scholar context and about the skills acquired by the students which should be transported to other texts in varied contexts

Characteristics of the acquisition of sonorant consonants orthography in Brazilian children from a São Paulo municipality

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)