Preschool bilinguals Portuguese-English and English-Portuguese performance in predictive skills of reading and writing and in oral narrative

• Grant number: 15/23282-7
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date until: May 01, 2016
• End date until: December 31, 2016
• Field of knowledge: Health Sciences - Speech Therapy
• Principal Investigator: Jacy Perissinoto
• Grantee: Stephanie Pandjarjian Mekhitarian
• Host Institution: Escola Paulista de Medicina (EPM). Universidade Federal de São Paulo (UNIFESP). Campus São Paulo. São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The bilingual is defined as the speaker who has communicative skills in two different languages. In this study, will be considered bilingual children who have a mother language, but who acquired a second language during childhood. Considering that the oral language skills are necessary for the learning of reading and writing, the objective of this research is to analyze the predictive skills of reading and writing in Portuguese-English and English-Portuguese bilinguals and compare them. Thus, the characterization of oral language of these bilinguals will be done by collecting an oral narrative and a non-word repetition test, which will be held for all children, in both languages. Oral narrative is a good measure of analysis because it allows collecting data on all subsystems of language. The non-word repetition test evaluates the phonological short-term memory, which is a component of phonological processing and is essential for the acquisition of reading and writing. The test used for assessment of phonological memory is the The Children's of nonword Repetition Test (CNRep) in English and the Brazilian Children's Test of Pseudoword Repetition (BCPR), which is the Portuguese version of the same test. For the production of the narrative, the sequence of figures that will be adopted is "A pedra no caminho", Eva Furnari (1988).