Abstract
Attention Deficit Disorder and Hyperactivity (ADDH) presents high prevalence among children and adults and is characterized by an inappropriate attention level, hyperactive behavior and impulsiveness. Apart from the nuclear symptomatology, it presents a number of cognitive and behavioral disorders as well as linguistic alterations. These get overlooked in the first years of age and manifest themselves when the child is first sent to school. To account for the above, this research attempts to determine differences in the syntactic complexity of oral discourses produced by boys and girls with ADDH and with typical development at different level of schooling (kindergarten, fourth and eighth grades). A correlational study was carried out with an ex post-facto retrospective design in which 120 children (60 ADDH; 60 control group) studying at private schools and subsidized schools in San Felipe, Chile, participated. After watching a video, each child narrated what it had watched, and its discourse was recorded, transcribed, and analyzed. Syntactic complexity indices revealed significant differences favoring non-ADDH children when the group was assessed in general despite no statistical significance was proved in the differences within each school level. Also, it was observed that the gap between the scores among ADDH and non-ADDH children within each group increased in the 8th graders in relation to the 4th graders and in the latter in relation to those in kindergarten, that indicate an improvement in the level of syntactic maturity.
| Translated title of the contribution | Syntactic performance on children with Attention Deficit Disorder and Hyperactivity: A comparative and ontogenetic perspective |
|---|---|
| Original language | Spanish |
| Pages (from-to) | 95-117 |
| Number of pages | 23 |
| Journal | RLA |
| Volume | 50 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 2012 |