Development of verbal fluency in children and the correlation with Reading and writing skills.
Language is one of complex cognitive processes that make it possible for humans to name our individual experiences and to attribute meaning through the symbolic process, which consequently allow interpersonal communication. Phonological, morphological, syntactic and semantic processes ensure a balanced relationship between the form, content and the appropriate use of the language by given individual. Verbal fluency (VF) refers to the ability to produce fluent speech and is strongly associated with lexical ability, access, knowledge of words and auditory attention. VF tests evaluate a complex set of skills, functions and cognitive processes, and, because they are easy and quick to apply, VF tests have also been widely used in different age groups. There is a lack of studies with VF of children in the primary school and mostly the research is oriented on the clinical population. The objective of the present work is to evaluate VF, through the Semantic Verbal Fluency (FVS) and Phonemic Verbal Fluency (FVF) tests in students from the 2nd to the 5th year of elementary school and verify their correlation with cognitive skills such as language, attention and working memory. 127 children of both sexes, aged between 8 - 12 years old, enrolled from the 2nd to the 5th year of kindergarten in a public school in Santo André, with typical and atypical reading and writing skills, participated in this research. The parents / guardians signed the Informed Consent Form TECL and the Term of Assent previously approved by the Ethics Committee. In FVS task children were asked to name animals and FVF children had to name words that started with the letter P. Performance on each task was assessed by the mean score of correct answers and type of error, as well as other variables related to the strategy used by the child in naming. The performances were compared between grades and in relation to reading and writing skills in the typical and atypical groups. Preliminary results will be presented.