A comunicação nas pessoas surdocegas em Portugal

Abstract

The deafblindness is a sum condition of the absence or low or reduction of hearing and visual modalities. In this context, the deafblind person faces limited access and knowledge of the world environment and difficulties on communicating with the family, friends and society, resulting in isolation. Observing an omission of number of people with deafblindness in Portugal, of descriptive data about their academic course together with their communication practices, this dissertation aims to present deafblindness condition along with its brain cross modal plasticity, to describe the linguistic and the communicative systems available for deafblind people that will provide access to world information and to communication, and to explore the communicative practicesof deafblind Portuguese adults. The exploration study of communicative practices was based on the development and application of a questionnaire to 15 Portuguese deafblind adults (from the north to the south of the country) and was analysed through a quantitative analysis of the answers and qualitative observations in the discussion. The results demonstrate that in Portugal the deafblindness seems to be post linguistics condition, all the participants show a previous deafness condition in the childhood. Sign language seems to be the predominant language system to communicate and its adaptation to tactile modality is current. However, writing Portuguese seems to be also frequently used by the deafblind people to communicate with hearing people and non-signers. The most widely used technology is the tablet, perhaps derived from the lack of information, or derived from the privation of monetary resources to acquire other technologies or to learn another communicative system as braille.

Date of Award	18 Nov 2016
Original language	Portuguese
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Mara Moita (Supervisor) & María del Pilar Fernandez-Viader (Supervisor)