Vocabulary and verbal comprehension of students with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder

To compare the receptive vocabulary and the verbal comprehension of schoolchildren with and without Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), as well as to confront their performance with the normative scores from applied tests.

40 students, with and without ADHD, were submitted to two receptive language tests, TVfusp and Token Test. Descriptive analysis was made, obtaining the average, median, minimum and maximum values. For the comparative assessment between groups, the t Student test was employed. For the comparison of performance scores obtained by the schoolchildren with the normative values from the tests applied, the Mann-Whitney test (p<0.05) was employed.

On all measures assessed, the performance of the children with ADHD was inferior to those without the disorder, which occurred both on TVfusp and Token Test. The comparison between groups showed considerable differences, with 50% and 5% of the ADHD schoolchildren presenting average scores, respectively, on TVfusp and Token Test, in comparison to the normative values of the tests.

Schoolchildren with ADHD presented more restricted vocabulary and more limited verbal comprehension when compared to their pairs without the disorder. The comparison of the performance obtained by groups with the normative values of the TVfusp and Token Test demonstrates that a portion of the children with ADHD presented performance within the average of the applied tests. This study calls attention to the importance of the language evaluation in children with suspicion of ADHD, going beyond evaluating the presence or absence of nuclear symptoms and their relations with the low academic performance.