Prephonological spelling and its connections with later word reading and spelling performance.

Before children are able to invent phonologically plausible spellings of words, they may produce strings of letters that do not seem to be motivated by the sounds in words. To examine the nature of these prephonological spellings and their relationship to later literacy performance, we administered a test in which children spelled a series of words using preformed letters, together with other literacy-related tests, to 106 U.S. 3- to 5-year-olds who had not received formal literacy instruction. We then followed the children into the first years of school, administering standardized spelling and word reading tests yearly for the subsequent 3 years. We used quantitative procedures to identify children who were prephonological spellers at Time 1. Although these children did not use phonologically plausible letters at a rate above that expected by chance, their spellings demonstrated some knowledge about common letters and digrams-graphotactic knowledge. The prephonological spellers also showed some knowledge of the alphabet and some phonological awareness, indicating that these skills do not suffice for phonological spelling. Children who were prephonological spellers at Time 1 were poorer readers and spellers at the later testing points, on average, than children who were not. This result reveals the continuity between children's early spelling attempts and their later literacy skills and the importance of phonology in spelling. We did not find, as Kessler et al. [Journal of Learning Disabilities (2013), Vol. 46, pp. 252-259] did in a study where children wrote words by hand, that better graphotactic knowledge among prephonological spellers is associated with better spelling during later years.

Sobrecarga e sintomatologia depressiva em familiares cuidadores de pessoas dependentes de álcool e outras drogas / Burden and depressive symptomatology in family caregivers of people dependent on alcohol and other drugs

Este estudo avaliou a sobrecarga subjetiva e a sintomatologia depressiva de familiares cuidadores de pessoas com dependência de álcool e outras drogas. Foram entrevistados 50 familiares de pacientes de uma instituição filantrópica de tratamento para abuso de substâncias psicoativas. Utilizou-se a escala de avaliação da sobrecarga Burden Interview, o Inventário de Depressão de Beck e um questionário sociodemográfico e clínico. A maioria dos familiares apresentou sobrecarga entre leve a moderada e grave, e aproximadamente metade apresentou sintomatologia depressiva entre leve e grave. Os preditores da sintomatologia depressiva, identificados pela análise de regressão linear múltipla, foram: em primeiro lugar, o grau de sobrecarga e, em seguida, as variáveis: baixa renda, não viver com um companheiro, avaliação negativa do relacionamento com o paciente e maior número de comportamentos problemáticos do paciente. Esses resultados indicam a necessidade de os serviços desenvolverem intervenções psicossociais que diminuam o grau de sobrecarga dos familiares cuidadores e melhorem o relacionamento com os pacientes, de forma a prevenir o desenvolvimento de uma sintomatologia depressiva.

This study evaluated the subjective burden and depressive symptomatology in family caregivers of patients with alcohol and other drugs dependence. Fifty family members of patients from a philanthropic institution for the treatment of substance abuse were interviewed. The Burden Interview for overload assessment scale, the Beck Depression Inventory and a sociodemographic and clinical questionnaire were used. Most family members had a burden between mild to moderate and severe, and approximately half had depressive symptoms between mild and severe. The predictors of depressive symptomatology identified by multiple linear regression analysis, were: first, the degree of burden and, then, the variables: low income, not living with a partner, negative assessment of the relationship with the patient and greater number of problematic patient behaviors. These results indicate the need for services to develop psychosocial interventions that reduce the degree of burden on family caregivers and improve the relationship with patients, in order to prevent the development of depressive symptoms.

O conhecimento tácito a partir da perspectiva de Michael Polanyi / Tacit knowledge from Michael Polanyi's perspective / El conocimiento tácito desde la perspectiva de Michael Polanyi

O propósito deste artigo é apresentar o conceito de conhecimento como proposto pelo epistemólogo Michael Polanyi, explicitando conceitos como conhecimento tácito, meaning e habitar. De acordo com o autor, todo processo de conhecimento sempre envolve uma dimensão tácita, que vai além daquela em que o conhecimento pode ser explicitado por palavras. O trabalho foi dividido em subpartes com a intenção de facilitar a compreensão dos elementos específicos contemplados por Polanyi para a compreensão do que é conhecer. Compreende-se que o conhecimento sempre envolve consciência que, por sua vez, é dividida em atenção focal e subsidiária, sendo o resultado da integração tácita de elementos subsidiários na relação com o elemento focal (meaning). Considera-se que, apesar de utilizada em diversos campos do conhecimento, a obra desse autor é pouco conhecida no Brasil e ressalta-se a importância de estudos que busquem explicitar sua abordagem, inclusive na relação com outros autores

The purpose of this paper is to present the concept of knowledge as proposed by the epistemologist Michael Polanyi, explaining concepts such as tacit knowledge, meaning and dwelling. According to the author, every process of knowledge always involves a tacit dimension, which goes beyond what can be explained by words. The work was divided into sub parts with the aim of facilitating the comprehension of the specific elements contemplated by Polanyi for the understanding of what is to know. It is understood that knowledge always involves consciousness, which in turn is divided into focal and subsidiary attention and is the result of the tacit integration of subsidiary elements in the relation to the focal element (meaning). It is considered that although it is used in several fields of knowledge, the work of this author is little known in Brazil and it is emphasized the importance of studies that seek to make explicit its approach, including in the relation with other authors

El propósito de este artículo es presentar el concepto de conocimiento como propuesto por el epistemólogo Michael Polanyi, explicitando conceptos como conocimiento tácito, meaning y habitar. De acuerdo con el autor, todo proceso de conocimiento siempre involucra una dimensión tácita, que va más allá de aquella en que el conocimiento puede ser explicitado por palabras. El trabajo se dividió en subpartes con la intención de facilitar la comprensión de los elementos contemplados por Polanyi para la comprensión de lo que es conocer. Se entiende que el conocimiento siempre implica conciencia que, a su vez, se divide en atención focal y subsidiaria, siendo el resultado de la integración tácita de elementos subsidiarios en la relación con el elemento focal (meaning). Se considera que a pesar de ser utilizado en diversos campos del conocimiento la obra de este autor es poco conocida en Brasil y se resalta la importancia de estudios que busquen explicitar su abordaje, incluso en la relación con otros autores

Statistical learning and spelling: Evidence from Brazilian prephonological spellers.

We analyzed the spelling attempts of Brazilian children (age 3 years, 3 months to 6 years, 0 months) who were prephonological spellers, in that they wrote using letters that did not reflect the phonemes in the words they were asked to spell. We tested the hypothesis that children use their statistical-learning skills to learn about the appearance of writing and that older prephonological spellers, who have had on average more exposure to writing, produce more wordlike spellings than younger prephonological spellers. We found that older prephonological spellers produced longer spellings and were more likely to use letters and digrams in proportion to their frequency of occurrence in Portuguese. There were also some age-related differences in children's tendency to use letters from their own names when writing other words. The results extend previous findings with learners of English to children who are learning a more transparent orthography.

Instituições, saúde e sociedade: contribuições da Psicologia / Institutions, health and society: contributions from Psychology

Neste livro, os autores buscam analisar as contribuições das pesquisas concluídas no âmbito do PPGPSI-UFSJ para os estudos sobre as relações do homem com a sociedade, com as instituições e com os processos de saúde e sofrimento; e refletir sobre novas possibilidades de investigações e novos modos de conduzir o trabalho de pesquisa para fins de ampliação e aprofundamento do conhecimento produzido

Measures of Kindergarten Spelling and Their Relations to Later Spelling Performance.

Learning the orthographic forms of words is important for both spelling and reading. To determine whether some methods of scoring children's early spellings predict later spelling performance better than do other methods, we analyzed data from 374 U.S. and Australian children who took a 10-word spelling test at the end of kindergarten (mean age 6 years, 2 months) and a standardized spelling test approximately two years later. Surprisingly, scoring methods that took account of phonological plausibility did not outperform methods that were based only on orthographic correctness. The scoring method that is most widely used in research with young children, which allots a certain number of points to each word and which considers both orthographic and phonological plausibility, did not rise to the top as a predictor. Prediction of Grade 2 spelling performance was improved to a small extent by considering children's tendency to reverse letters in kindergarten.

Uma revisão crítica de três perspectivas sobre o desenvolvimento da escrita / A critical review of three perspectives in spelling development

Aprender a ler e a escrever está entre os maiores desafios de uma criança. Um componente importante da alfabetização é a escrita. Apesar do aumento de interesse pela escrita nos últimos anos, seu estudo ainda não atrai tanta atenção quanto o da leitura. Este artigo revisa três perspectivas no estudo do desenvolvimento da escrita: fonológica, cons-trutivista e da aprendizagem estatística. Atenção especial é dada aos estudos que examinam o desenvolvimento da escrita de forma translinguística, já que são cruciais para diferenciar as propriedades do desenvolvimento da escrita que são universais, daquelas que são específicas ao sistema de escrita da criança. As tradicionais perspectivas fonológicas e construtivistas são revisadas e criticamente avaliadas sob a perspectiva da aprendizagem estatística, mediante a revisão de seus conceitos fundamentais, com base estudos recentes que corroboram algumas de suas premissas.

Learning how to read and spell can be one of the biggest challenges in children's lives. Although interest in spelling development has increased in recent years, the study of spelling has still not attracted as much attention as the study of reading. This article reviews three perspectives in the study of spelling development: phonological, constructivist and the statistical learning perspectives. We devote special attention to studies that have examined spelling development cross-linguistically, as these studies are crucial for differentiating universal properties of spelling development from those that are adaptations to specific features of the child's language or target writing system. The traditional phonological and constructivist perspectives will be reviewed and evaluated and a new perspective, statistical learning, will be introduced, along with a revision of its fundamental concepts and recent studies that corroborate its claims.

Uma revisão crítica de três perspectivas sobre o desenvolvimento da escrita / A critical review of three perspectives in spelling development

Aprender a ler e a escrever está entre os maiores desafios de uma criança. Um componente importante da alfabetização é a escrita. Apesar do aumento de interesse pela escrita nos últimos anos, seu estudo ainda não atrai tanta atenção quanto o da leitura. Este artigo revisa três perspectivas no estudo do desenvolvimento da escrita: fonológica, cons-trutivista e da aprendizagem estatística. Atenção especial é dada aos estudos que examinam o desenvolvimento da escrita de forma translinguística, já que são cruciais para diferenciar as propriedades do desenvolvimento da escrita que são universais, daquelas que são específicas ao sistema de escrita da criança. As tradicionais perspectivas fonológicas e construtivistas são revisadas e criticamente avaliadas sob a perspectiva da aprendizagem estatística, mediante a revisão de seus conceitos fundamentais, com base estudos recentes que corroboram algumas de suas premissas.(AU)

Learning how to read and spell can be one of the biggest challenges in children's lives. Although interest in spelling development has increased in recent years, the study of spelling has still not attracted as much attention as the study of reading. This article reviews three perspectives in the study of spelling development: phonological, constructivist and the statistical learning perspectives. We devote special attention to studies that have examined spelling development cross-linguistically, as these studies are crucial for differentiating universal properties of spelling development from those that are adaptations to specific features of the child's language or target writing system. The traditional phonological and constructivist perspectives will be reviewed and evaluated and a new perspective, statistical learning, will be introduced, along with a revision of its fundamental concepts and recent studies that corroborate its claims.(AU)

Variation and repetition in the spelling of young children.

A number of investigators have suggested that young children, even those who do not yet represent the phonological forms of words in their spellings, tend to use different strings of letters for different words. However, empirical evidence that children possess a concept of between-word variation has been weak. In a study by Pollo, Kessler, and Treiman (2009), in fact, prephonological spellers were more likely to write different words in the same way than would be expected on the basis of chance, not less likely. In the current study, preschool-age prephonological and phonological spellers showed a tendency to repeat spellings and parts of spellings that they had recently used. However, even prephonological spellers (mean age∼4 years 8 months) showed more repetition when spelling the same word twice in succession than when spelling different words. The results suggest that children who have not yet learned to use writing to represent the sounds of speech show some knowledge that writing represents words and, thus, should vary to show differences between them. The results further suggest that in spelling, as in other domains, children have a tendency to repeat recent behaviors.

Cross-cultural adaptation to Brazil of Medication Adherence Rating Scale for psychiatric patients / Adaptação transcultural para o Brasil da Medication Adherence Rating Scale para pacientes psiquiátricos

Objective The purpose of this research was to make a cross-cultural adaptation of the Medication Adherence Rating Scale (MARS) for psychiatric patients to the Brazilian context. Methods The procedure consisted of four phases: translation of the original scale, back-translation, review by an Expert Committee and Pre-test study with a patients’ sample. Results The Expert Committee corrected the items’ translation when necessary and modified the scale administration format and its instructions from self-report to face-to-face interview form in order to ensure easy understanding by the target population. During Pre-test, the instructions and most of the items were properly understood by patients, with the exception of three of them which had to be changed in order to ensure better understanding. The Pre-test sample was composed by 30 psychiatric patients, with severe and persistent disorders mainly single (46.7%), female (60.0%), with a mean age of 43.8 years old and an average of five years of education. Conclusion The Brazilian version of MARS scale is now adapted to the Brazilian Portuguese language and culture and is easily understood by the psychiatric target population. It is necessary to do further research to evaluate the scale psychometric qualities of validity and reliability in order to use it in Brazil. .

Objetivo Esta pesquisa teve como objetivo fazer a adaptação transcultural do instrumento Medication Adherence Rating Scale (MARS) para pacientes psiquiátricos no contexto brasileiro. Métodos O procedimento incluiu quatro fases: tradução da escala original, retradução, revisão por Comissão de Especialistas e Pré-teste com uma amostra de pacientes. Resultados A Comissão de Especialistas adequou a redação dos itens e das instruções e mudou a forma de aplicação da escala, que passou de autoaplicação para o formato de entrevista, visando à maior facilidade de compreensão pela população-alvo. No Pré-teste, as instruções e a maioria dos itens foram bem compreendidas, com exceção de três questões que apresentaram palavras que suscitaram dúvidas nos participantes, tendo sido modificadas para melhor compreensão. A amostra do pré-teste foi composta de 30 pacientes psiquiátricos, com transtornos graves e persistentes, majoritariamente solteiros (46,7%), do sexo feminino (60,0%) com idade média de 43,8 anos e cinco anos de escolaridade, em média. Conclusão A versão brasileira da escala MARS constitui um instrumento adaptado para o contexto linguístico e cultural brasileiro e de fácil compreensão pela população-alvo de pacientes psiquiátricos. Estudos futuros deverão investigar as qualidades psicométricas de validade e confiabilidade desta escala para que ela possa ser utilizada no contexto brasileiro. .

Do young children spell words syllabically? Evidence from learners of Brazilian Portuguese.

The theory that learners of alphabetic writing systems go through a period during which they treat writing as representing syllables is highly influential, especially as applied to learners of Romance languages. The results of Study 1, a 2-year longitudinal study of 76 Portuguese speakers in Brazil from 4 to 6 years of age, did not support this theory. Although most children produced some spellings of words in which the number of letters matched the number of syllables, few children produced significantly more such spellings than expected on the basis of chance. When such spellings did occur, they appeared to reflect partially successful attempts to represent phonemes rather than attempts to represent syllables. Study 2, with 68 Brazilian 4- and 5-year-olds, found similar results even when children spelled words that contained three or four syllables in which all vowels are letter names--conditions that have been thought to favor syllabic spelling. The influential theory that learners of Romance languages go through a period during which they use writing to represent the level of syllables appears to lack a solid empirical foundation.

Frequency analyses of prephonological spellings as predictors of success in conventional spelling.

The present study explored how children's prephonological writing foretells differential learning outcomes in primary school. The authors asked Portuguese-speaking preschool children in Brazil (mean age 4 year 3 months) to spell 12 words. Monte Carlo tests were used to identify the 31 children whose writing was not based on spellings or sounds of the target words. Two and a half years later, the children took a standardized spelling test. The more closely the digram (two-letter sequence) frequencies in the preschool task correlated with those in children's books, the better scores the children had in primary school, and the more preschoolers used letters from their own name, the lower their subsequent scores. Thus, preschoolers whose prephonological writing revealed attentiveness to the statistical properties of text subsequently performed better in conventional spelling. These analytic techniques may help in the early identification of children at risk for spelling difficulties.

Statistical patterns in children's early writing.

Many theories of spelling development claim that before children begin to spell phonologically, their spellings are random strings of letters. We evaluated this idea by testing young children (mean age=4 years 9 months) in Brazil and the United States and selecting a group of prephonological spellers. The spellings of this prephonological group showed a number of patterns that reflected things such as the frequencies of letters and bigrams in children's language. The prephonological spellers in the two countries produced spellings that differed in some respects, consistent with their exposure to different written languages. We found no evidence for reportedly universal patterns in early spelling such as the idea that children write one letter for each syllable. Overall, our results reveal that early spellings that are not phonological are by no means random or universal and preserve certain patterns in the writing to which children have been exposed.

O papel do conhecimento do nome das letras no início da aprendizagem da leitura: evidência de indivíduos com síndrome de Down / Modularity of action programs in normal and Down syndrome individuals

O presente estudo investiga as estratégias que indivíduos com síndrome de Down utilizam para aprender a ler palavras no início da aprendizagem da leitura. Indivíduos com síndrome de Down que conheciam ou não o nome das letras aprenderam a ler dois tipos de grafias simplificadas: grafias fonéticas, em que as letras correspondiam a sons na pronúncia das palavras (Ex.: BTRA para beterraba) e grafias visuais, em que as letras não representavam sons na pronúncia das palavras, mas eram visualmente mais salientes (Ex.: UQLG para detetive). Os resultados questionam a hipótese de que indivíduos com síndrome de Down aprendem a ler visualmente. Os indivíduos que não conheciam o nome das letras acharam ambos os tipos de grafia muito difíceis. Por outro lado, os indivíduos que conheciam o nome das letras acharam as grafias fonéticas significativamente mais fáceis do que as grafias visuais(AU)

O papel do conhecimento do nome das letras no início da aprendizagem da leitura: evidência de indivíduos com síndrome de Down / The role of knowledge of the name of letters at the beginning of reading learning: evidence of individuals with Down syndrome

O presente estudo investiga as estratégias que indivíduos com síndrome de Down utilizam para aprender a ler palavras no início da aprendizagem da leitura. Indivíduos com síndrome de Down que conheciam ou não o nome das letras aprenderam a ler dois tipos de grafias simplificadas: grafias fonéticas, em que as letras correspondiam a sons na pronúncia das palavras (Ex.: BTRA para beterraba) e grafias visuais, em que as letras não representavam sons na pronúncia das palavras, mas eram visualmente mais salientes (Ex.: UQLG para detetive). Os resultados questionam a hipótese de que indivíduos com síndrome de Down aprendem a ler visualmente. Os indivíduos que não conheciam o nome das letras acharam ambos os tipos de grafia muito difíceis. Por outro lado, os indivíduos que conheciam o nome das letras acharam as grafias fonéticas significativamente mais fáceis do que as grafias visuais

Vowels, syllables, and letter names: differences between young children's spelling in English and Portuguese.

Young Portuguese-speaking children have been reported to produce more vowel- and syllable-oriented spellings than have English speakers. To investigate the extent and source of such differences, we analyzed children's vocabulary and found that Portuguese words have more vowel letter names and a higher vowel-consonant ratio than do English words. In a spelling experiment, we found that Portuguese speakers used more vowels, but did not produce more syllabic spellings, than did English speakers. The differences that we observed are attributable to quantitative differences in the languages and their writing and letter name systems. They do not support the widespread idea that speakers of Romance languages pass through an additional, syllabic, stage of development.