TEACHING PORTUGUESE GRAMMAR TO INDIVIDUALS WITH DEAFNESS AND LISTENERS: A BEHAVIORAL ANALYSIS PROPOSAL

• Grant number: 12/19864-2
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: December 01, 2012
• End date: November 30, 2013
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Psychology
• Principal Investigator: Antonio Celso de Noronha Goyos
• Grantee: Bárbara Leocárdio Jacomini Menin
• Host Institution: Centro de Educação e Ciências Humanas (CECH). Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCAR). São Carlos , SP, Brazil

Abstract

Acquisition of written Portuguese by hearing impaired people may be complicateddue to the differences between grammatical structures in written and signed language. Suchdifferences may result in deficits on written repertoire, communication and academic skills.Resende (2011) taught hearing impaired children four equivalent stimulus classes involvingsubjects, verbs, prepositions and complements, with four stimuli in each class. Then, one sequencecomposed of a member from each class (a subject, a verb, a preposition and a complement) wastaught. Additional tests indicated the emergence of novel sequences with the remaining membersof each class, and also, with novel stimuli that were not used in the previous phases of the study.Considering the results seen in the literature on stimulus equivalence related to sequencing behaviorestablishment and emergence, in the present study, a procedure to teach grammatical ordering inwritten Portuguese is proposed. Hearing impaired and non-hearing impaired human individuals willparticipate in three experiments. The first experiment in this study proposes the gradual introductionof each element of a single sequence during test probes as a way to obtain an immediate,satisfactory performance. Experiment 2 intends to control participants` previous history, who willbe college students, by using pseudo-words. Experiment 3 intends to expand Resende (2011) studyfeatures, an effective teaching procedure to the appropriate use of verb-preposition arbitraryrelations in Portuguese. To accomplish that, a multiple exemplar instruction procedure to teachthose relations will be introduced followed by transfer of function tests to novel verb-prepositionpairs. An analysis will be carried out to identify the errors and the possible additional contextualvariables that may control the transfer of ordinal functions. These experiments may represent a stepin the search of the application of procedures derived from stimulus equivalence paradigm to teachwhat has been conventionally called grammatical behavior.