Mediação do brinquedo na comunicação com crianças com transtornos do espectro autista

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate the role of toys in communication with children with Autism Spectrum Disorder - ASD. The motivation for this research was to diversify forms of production of knowledge about communication deficits configured in the cases of ASD, alerting to limitations of the predominance of classic experimental research, where prioritized explanations based on the exclusive analysis of neurodevelopment. In this orientation, as an alternative to the procedures of classical experimental research, we adopt a cyclical strategy, between theoretical discussions, empirical observations and assume the assumptions of Cultural Psychology. The central objective of this research was to investigate mediation of the toy in communication during therapeutic activities. Underlying the definition of this objective, there is a reaffirmation of the relevance of mediation processes, pointed out in the well-known statement of Vigotski on the social origin of psychological processes. The objective of social socialisconference conferenced as discussions of Cultural Psychology status to non communements for human human development. This status is also recognized in this research. Still in the broad articulation with theoretical presuppositions, we highlight Bakhtin's explanations about human language addressing and the function of alterity as constitutive aspects of dialogue, a central process in his analysis of the relationship between communication and human development. Two children with the diagnosis of ASD, characterized as non-users of speech, participated in this study. Regarding the methodological aspects, a case study was carried out. The data were recorded in videos of the interaction of these children during therapeutic activities involving toys. These records were carried out in three different contexts: activity mediated by known toy, activity mediated by new toy without playful appeal and activity mediated by new toy with playful appeal. In the results we discuss shared attention, the function of alterity and semiotic regulation, as well as processes that distinguish a communication approach to cultural psychology from that characterized in the classic experimental researches that investigate the communication from the discrete measures of emitter, message and receptor. From the analysis of shared attention, the function of alterity and semiotic regulation, we explored an approach of the communication deficits within the dialog mediated by the toy, experienced by the communication actors that in this study were the children and the therapist. The dialogical relationship that we refer to here denounces the insufficiency of analyzes that do not invest efforts to explain micro-processes configured in the look at the step by step of the dialogue, according to the second of the alternation of turns in the interaction. We observed in the results that these micro-processes are loaded as intense variability configured in the inter-dependence between the actors that make it impossible to linearly cut the moment of the emission, the message and the reception.