Reconhecimento de fala, habilidades auditivas e cognitivas em adultos bilíngues

Abstract

OBJECTIVE: to verify and to compare the performance of monolingual and bilingual individuals in the recognition of situations of favorable listening (silence) and in situations of not favorable listening (noise), with their cognitive and listening abilities. MATERIAL AND METHOD: The present study is about an observational research, transversal, and descriptive, which compares the findings of monolingual and bilingual individuals. This group study was formed by 87 individuals between 18 and 55 years old, distributed in control groups, 30 monolingual Brazilian portuguese speaking and group study, 31 bilingual brazilian s portuguese and german speakers, and 26 bilinguals brazilian s portuguese and Italian speakers. The individuals were summoned to two different moments of surveying, initially the basic surveys for basic audio of recognition of speaking was made by the test lista de sentenças in portuguese (LSP). Furthermore, the survey about the audio assessment was analyzed and performed by using two tests, which are dissilabos alternados and sobrepostos (SSW) and teste dicotico de digitos (TDD). Afterwards, a survey about the cognitive abilities was performed, using the bateria de provas de reciocinio (BPR-5) test. RESULTS: The completed surveys made using the LSP test have had shown that bilingual individuals and monolingual individuals develop similar speaking performances, when summoned to silence, in the speaking recognition of speech in noise, there was a better verified performance of the bilingual groups in comparison to the monolinguals. Additionally, for the cognitive abilities there was a better performance of general cognition, with a slight statistic perceptual error, which favored bilinguals. In term of each one of the surveyed cognitive abilities, the verbal reasoning, spatial and mechanic showed a big statistic difference, which favored bilinguals. However, in logic and math, bilinguals and monolinguals did not show any divergence. In audio abilities, which were verified by SSW s test, there was a statistic significant difference, favoring bilinguals. CONCLUSION: After this research, one must acknowledge that bilingual and monolingual individuals present similar performances when it comes to hearing and understanding once the speech is presented in silence. When the speech is presented through noise, there were illustrating facts that bilinguals present better performance compared to monolinguals. In the cognitive field, we shall suggest that life experience in bilinguals might have influence over the cognitive performance and verbal judgment, spatial and mechanic, as well as in hearing abilities of attention and background figure.