Alessandra Gotuzo Seabra Capovilla

Efeitos do treino de consciência fonológica em crianças com baixo nível sócio-econômico

A phonological awareness training associated with a grapheme-phoneme correspondence training was applied to low socioeconomic status (SES) first graders of a public school. Effects on metaphonological skills, reading, spelling, letter knowledge, working memory, and lexical access to long-term memory were assessed. The experimental group, with a below average initial phonological awareness score, was compared to two control groups, one above and one below average. After 27 30-minute training sessions, the experimental group presented improvements in phonological awareness, reading and spelling of words and pseudowords, and letter knowledge. The study demonstrated that it is possible to treat phonological, reading and spelling delays in children with low SES, using the same training procedure that has proved successful with average SES children.

Consciência sintática no ensino fundamental: correlações com consciência fonológica, vocabulário, leitura e escrita

Metalinguistic skills such as phonological awareness and syntactic awareness are important to reading and spelling acquisition. Standardized tests on phonological awareness, reading competence, spelling under dictation and receptive vocabulary in Brazilian Portuguese are already available in the literature. This paper presents a Syntactic Awareness Test, along with preliminary validation data from 204 first to fourth grade elementary school children. Children were tested in syntactic awareness, phonological awareness, reading, spelling and receptive vocabulary. Results showed significant effects of school grade upon Syntactic Awareness Test overall scores, as well as upon specific scores in all its four subtests, even after controlling for the effect of verbal intelligence by using vocabulary scores as covariant. Significant effects of school grade upon phonological awareness, reading, spelling and vocabulary were also found. Finally, overall scores in all five tests were positively interrelated, which gives support to published evidences about relationships holding among reading, spelling and metalinguistic skills.

Quando alunos surdos escolhem palavras escritas para nomear figuras: paralexias ortográficas, semânticas e quirêmicas

The Picture-Print Matching Test (PPMT2.1) assesses the ability of naming pictures by choosing from among written words, and analyzes the cheremic, semantic and orthographic processes involved. The participants were 313 1st-9th grade deaf students, aged 6-34 years, from Sao Paulo bilingual schools, of which 77% had congenital auditory loss, and 49%, profound congenital loss. Students were exposed to the following tests: PPMT1.1 and 2.1, Receptive Vocabulary Test in Libras (RVTL), Word Reading Competence Test (WRCT), Sentence Reading Test (SRT), Picture Naming by Writing Test (PNWT), Sign Naming by Writing Test (SNWT), and Sign-Print Matching Test (SPMT). A standardization table was generated as a function of grade level PPMT2.1 presented the following significant positive correlations: very high (r = 0,89) with PPMT1.1; high (r = 0,77-0,80) with Picture Naming by Writing (PNWT) and Sentence Reading (SRT); medium (r = 0,62-0,68) with Sign Naming by Writing and Matching (SNWT and SPMT) and Word Reading Competence (WRCT), and low (r = 0,36) with Libras Receptive Vocabulary (RVTL). Out of 1.507 paralexias, 583 were orthographic, 546 were semantic, and 378 were cheremic. The latter revealed that, when matching print to pictures, deaf students first evoke signs to pictures and subsequently words to signs. This corroborates the hypothesis that cheremic lexicon links orthographic and pictorial lexicons. As to paralexias in Picture-Print Matching Test (PPMT2.1), orthographic paralexias were inversely proportional to reading competence (WRCT scores), whereas cheremic paralexias were inversely proportional to Libras Receptive Vocabulary (RVTL scores), which corroborates the validity of PPMT2.1 in inducing orthographic paralexias and cheremic paralexias.

Desenvolvimento de conceitos: o paradigma das descobertas

Keil aimed at investigating whether the discovery of internal essences, or underlying causal principies, would affeet the way children categorize concepts of natural species and artifacts. The present paper replicates part of Keil s (1989) experiment. The purpose was to ascertain whether the results were applicable to the Brazilian culture. Thirty children were assigned to three groups of 617, 8/9, and 10/11 years of age. Each was told four stories elaborated by Keil, previously translated, two of them were about natural species and the other two were about artifacts. They depicted situations in which scientists discovered that the properties that defined something were hidden under the surface aspects of something else. At the end of each one, the experimenter asked the child whether it was a case of X (i.e., the appearance of an objeet), or Y (i.e., the defining attributes of the object). With respect to artifacts, subjects were not misled by surface aspects, but rather were able to correctly assess the identity of the artifacts. However, with regard to natural species, the defining attributes were effective only for the older children. These findings give support to Keils ones.