Ângela Maria Vieira Pinheiro

Reading and Spelling Development in Brazilian Portuguese.

This paper describes the development of reading and spelling procedures in Portuguese speaking children from 1st to 4th grade and discusses whether the developmental models of Frith, Seymour and Stuart & Coltheart may account for this development. This study is based on reaction time and error measurements of the reading and spelling of isolated words and pseudowords. The words varied in frequency, length and spelling-to-sound-regularity and the non-words varied only in length and spelling-to-sound regularity. The results indicated that the children tested did not pass through a logographic stage and that their reading and spelling initially involved a non-lexical process which from the beginning was influenced by a developing lexical process (that became progressively more important as development progressed), suggesting the use of overlapping processes. This finding contradicts Friths strictly sequential theory but not Seymours model, which allows for concurrent development of processes. Despite the fact that the present data do not fit into the definition of Seymours orthographic stage, there were indications of a shift from the alphabetic to the orthographic stage and also that the process of lexicalization occurs more rapidly in reading than in spelling. Another finding was that the dual-process reading/spelling model, developed in English, can be extended to Portuguese.

O impacto da mudança no critério de acerto na distribuição dos escores do subteste de leitura do teste de desempenho escolar

The study investigates the impact of the introduction of a new class of errors within the original error set of the reading subtest of the Performance School Test on the distribution of the scores. The sample consisted of 306 1 st - 4 th grades of the school system of Belo Horizonte who participated in the study. For each child two scores were given: one based on the manual criteria (EB1) and the other on the criteria introduced in the present study (EB2) - which considered explicit sounding out of syllables or of part of the stimuli and self- corrections as incorrect responses. The results showed that the choice of the EB2 made the test more discriminative, but such a modification did not prevent the emergence of a ceiling effect, nor did it enable a normal distribution of the scores. The analysis showed that apart from the permissive criteria the excess of easy words and the shortage of difficult words affected the variability of the scores. Hypotheses about the difficulty of words were discussed in light of the psycholinguistics.The study investigates the impact of the introduction of a new class of errors within the original error set of the reading subtest of the Performance School Test on the distribution of the scores. The sample consisted of 306 1 4 grades of the school system of Belo Horizonte who participated in the study. For each child two scores were given: one based on the manual criteria (EB1) and the other on the criteria introduced in the present study (EB2) – which considered explicit sounding out of syllables or of part of the stimuli and selfcorrections as incorrect responses. The results showed that the choice of the EB2 made the test more discriminative, but such a modification did not prevent the emergence of a ceiling effect, nor did it enable a normal distribution of the scores. The analysis showed that apart from the permissive criteria the excess of easy words and the shortage of difficult words affected the variability of the scores. Hypotheses about the difficulty of words were discussed in light of the psycholinguistics.

Vinte anos de estudo sobre o reconhecimento de palavras em crianças falantes do português: uma revisão de literatura

The present work attempts to review the main conclusions of the studies carried out in the area of word recognition with Portuguese speaking children and to raise theoretical and methodological issues that still require the attention of researchers. The emphasis of this work is centered on the word reading aloud task performed by children in the process of reading acquisition. Three major conclusions were derived from the review: (a) generally, the collection of studies in Portuguese language confirm the assumptions of the dual-route model of word recognition; (b) Portuguese speaking children seem to prefer to use the phonological strategy in the beginning of the reading process, which is then gradually substituted by the preferential use of the lexical strategy; and (c) methodological issues have interfered in the results found by different researchers, and these are related to the manner of application of the reading task, the type of statistical analysis carried out and to the direction (from the reading or spelling standpoint) and number of categories considered in the classification of regularity of the words.

Aspectos prosódicos temporais da leitura de escolares com dislexia do desenvolvimento

PURPOSE: To analyze the temporal prosodic aspect in loud reading of students with and without dyslexia from the phonetic point of view through acoustic and perceptual evaluation, in order to identify differences in performance between the two types of readers that may point to particular characteristics of dyslexia. METHODS: Forty students from 3rd to 5th grades with ages ranging from nine to 14 years, ten dyslexic (clinical group) and 30 without any complaints of learning deficits (non-clinical group) were recorded during loud reading of a text. Data were perceptually and acoustically analyzed using the software WinPitch. The following measures were taken: pause duration and location, total speaking time, speaking rate, articulation time, and articulation rate. RESULTS: In comparison to the non-clinical group, the clinical group had a higher number of and longer pauses; their speaking and articulation rates indicated, respectively, a lower reading speed and slowness in the production of each articulatory gesture. CONCLUSION: The characteristics identified in reading processing by dyslexic children make the prosodic organization in text reading difficult.

Cognitive assessment of competent and impaired reading in Scottish and Brazilian children

This is an individual case study combined with subject sampling which compared the reading performance of good and poor Brazilian 4th grade children with Scottish children of equivalent reading competence and age range. A measure of efficient performance -- low error rates and fast vocal reaction-times for correct responses to words (of varying familiarity, regularity and length) and non-words (of varying length) -- was obtained and used as a basis for the identification of inefficiencies among the subjects whose results were outside the main range. Competent reading in Brazilian Portuguese and Scottish showed similarities in regard to time processing and error rates for the reading of words and non-words and mainly differed in terms of the generality of the regularity effect and of the rate of letter processing of words and for non-words. In what concerns impaired reading, in both nationalities there were examples of pure phonological dyslexia and of impairments affecting both lexical and non-lexical processes with a bias to the phonological pattern. In contrast to the Scottish sample, no cases of predominant morphemic dyslexia nor ambiguous cases were found among the Brazilians.

Prosody and reading in dyslexic children.

This study investigates the role of prosody in the reading aloud of dyslexic children. Ten dyslexic and 30 non-dyslexic control children (mean age 9.5 and 9.9 years, respectively) were recorded when reading a text of appropriate level and subsequently asked to retell it and tested on its comprehension. The data were analysed acoustically by the WinPitchPro programme. The temporal and intonational processing of reading of the two groups were contrasted and revealed unusual characteristics of the dyslexic group with respect to what follows: (1) temporal processing (reduced speeds of reading and articulation and alterations in the number and duration of pauses); (2) variation of the fundamental frequency (limited ability to vary the melody at the phrasal and phonemic level); and (3) vowel stress patterning (difficulty in producing typical stress patterns, and of marking the pre-stressed and stressed syllables). Fulfilling its objective, the present study promotes advances in the understanding of the functioning of prosody in reading aloud in dyslexia.

Escala da Avaliação da Competência da Leitura pelo Professor (EACOL): evidências de validade de critério

The Scale of Assessment of Reading Competence of Students by the Professor (EACOL) was created with the goal of providing a quick and inexpensive screening for learning diffi culties of students by teachers. The present study investigates the correlation between the performance of children in reading single words aloud and their evaluation by the teachers in the EACOL. We evaluated 137 children (52% female) attending the 2nd to the 5th year of schooling in the city of Belo Horizonte. In general, the correlations between children’s performance in reading words and EACOL were moderate, and the agreement in performance was better between lower ability classifi cations. The results are promising, but point to the need for adjustments to the items of EACOL in order to improve the agreement in the highest levels of skill.

Validade de construto da versão brasileira do Inventário Espectral de Externalização: evidências a partir de uma amostra de estudantes universitários

CONTEXTO: Externalizacao e uma dimensao das diferencas individuais que da substrato e unifica tracos impulsivos e agressivos de personalidade a transtornos mentais relacionados ao uso de substância e a conduta antissocial. OBJETIVOS: O presente estudo objetivou apresentar indicadores de validade de construto da versao brasileira do Inventario Espectral de Externalizacao. METODO: Trata-se de um estudo psicometrico de orientacao correlacional. Foram utilizadas duas tecnicas classicas de representacao de construto: analise exploratoria de fatores comuns e analise de consistencia interna. A amostra consistiu de 258 participantes de ambos os sexos, provenientes de diferentes cursos universitarios de duas instituicoes publicas do estado de Minas Gerais. RESULTADOS: A analise fatorial resultou em um modelo de um fator de segunda ordem (Externalizacao) com tres fatores de primeira ordem (dimensoes de agressao, de uso de substância e de impulsividade/alienacao). Os coeficientes alfa mostraram-se bastante elevados, com indices acima de 0,9 tanto para os tres fatores de primeira ordem quanto para o fator geral. CONCLUSAO: Combinados, os resultados trazem evidencias de validade e de fidedignidade para a versao brasileira do Inventario Espectral de Externalizacao no que tange a sua aplicabilidade a estudantes universitarios.

Construção de uma tarefa de leitura em voz alta de palavras: análise psicométrica dos itens

The study reports the psychometric inquiry of a word reading aloud task. A group of 1st to 4th grade school children read aloud 323 low frequency words that were presented in a computer screen. The item analysis selected 112 potential items that presented satisfactory levels of difficulty, discrimination, item total correlation, and internal consistency. Generally, the selected items were not difficult to the sample. Nevertheless, most items had good levels of discrimination and item total correlation. The internal consistency index attested for the homogeneity of the task and for the construct unidimensionality. Considerations of Embretson (1983) about construct representation research and nomothetic span research are outlined.

Reading Test Sentence Comprehension: an adapted Version of Lobrot's Lecture 3 Test for Brazilian Portuguese

Our aim was to analyse the linguistic structure of the Lobrots Lecture 3 (L3) reading test and to describe the procedure for its adaptation to a Brazilian cultural-linguistic context. The resulting adapted version is called the Reading Test-Sentence Comprehension [Teste de Leitura: Compreensão de Sentenças (TELCS)] and was developed using the European Portuguese adaptation of L3 as a reference. The present study was conducted in seven steps: (1) classification of the response alternatives of L3 test; (2) adaptation of the original sentences into Brazilian Portuguese; (3) back-translation; (4) adaptation of the distractors from TELCS; (5) configuration of TELCS; (6) pilot study; and (7) validation and standardization. In comparison with L3, TELCS included new linguistic and structural variables, such as frequency of occurrence of the distractors, gender neutrality and position of the target words. The instrument can be used for a collective screening or individual clinical administration purposes to evaluate the reading ability of second-to-fifth-grade and 7-to-11-year-old students.