Estudos de Psicologia I Campinas I 32(4) I 605-615 I outubro -dezembro 2015

Introduction: Speech disorders may impair the construction of phonemegrapheme association and affect decoding and reading fluency. Purpose: To describe the performance profiles of schoolchildren diagnosed with reading disorder (RD) and with reading disorder associated with phonological disorder (PD) in the task of reading of isolated items according to the psycholinguistic characteristics of such items. Methods: The medical records of 36 schoolchildren enrolled at the 4 th and 5 th grades of elementary school were analyzed as follows: 18 children with RD were paired with other 18 children with typical development according to age, schooling, and gender. The study sample was divided into four groups: Study Group 1 (SG1), composed of 10 schoolchildren with RD; Study Group 2 (SG2), comprising eight schoolchildren with RD and PD; Control Group paired with SG1 (CG1); and CG paired with SG2 (CG2). The reading of words and pseudo words was compared with respect to orthographic regularity, frequency, and extension. The data were statistically analyzed. Results: Lower values of rate and accuracy were observed in the study groups compared with those of the control groups, except for the rate of pseudo words in SG2. The study groups showed lower statistical results than the control groups for all regularity variables, except for irregular words. SG1 and CG1 presented similar performance in the reading of monosyllabic and polysyllabic words. Regarding trisyllabic and dissyllable words, significantly lower mean values were found in SG1 compared with those of CG1; however, SG2 showed significantly lower performance regardless of item extension. Performance of the study groups with respect to item familiarity was significantly lower for all variables, except for high frequency. Conclusion: Children with RD present good use of the lexical route and difficulty with the phonological route. Phonological speech disorder impairs the performance of schoolchildren on both reading routes.

Purpose This paper presents procedures and steps to create a list of homonyms, their meanings and representative images. Methods One hundred and three homonyms in Brazilian Portuguese were secluded through searches in text books and dictionaries and the meanings were verified. The homonyms were analyzed and selected according pre-established criteria. Twenty-six homonyms with two meanings were selected and one image was used to represent each meaning. To test the instrument, twenty elementary school children in 4th (n = 10) and 5ht (n = 10) grades were selected from a private school in São Paulo. To identify the meanings of major and minor occurrence, the students gave their understanding of the words presented to them orally. The students were also asked to name the fifty-two images to determine the degree of recognition. Percentages of accuracy were calculated. Results Among the 26 homonyms, two were excluded because the students were unable to name them. Two images were little recognized and, therefore, replaced with others that better represented the homonyms. Conclusion A list of 24 homonyms and 48 images (one for each meaning) was developed. The results of the presentation of these items to elementary school children in the 4th and 5th grades proved the adequacy of the list. The material is seen as efficient for use in recognition tasks and can be applied in semantic priming tasks.