Teoria da mente e compreensão leitora: um estudo com alunos participantes de um programa de desenvolvimento sociocognitivo.

Abstract

The capacity of the child to interfere over mental states, offering explications to the behavior of the others is called the theory of the mind. The language plays an important role in the development of sociocognitive ability, because the use of a mentalistic vocabulary can promote the child’s understanding about the thoughts, feelings and wishes of the people around her and oh the characters from the stories, facilitating the social adjustment and reading comprehension. For this study was delimited three goals, to know: a) evaluate and compare performance on tasks of theory of the mind, reading comprehension (Cloze 2 and 3) and reading subtest of the TDE in children participating and not participating in a program of social cognitive development; b) to correlate the performance of two groups regarding the three instruments of evaluation applied; and c) define and compare the categories of mental terms evoked by the two groups using the cloze technique. In they’re school environment, 77 children performed the tasks of the Theory of Mind Scale, the Reading subtest of the TDE Cloze tests applied. The results showed no significant difference between the performance of children participating and not participating in the three instruments applied, suggesting that individual factors, that were not addressed here, could have contributed, partly , to the occurrence of similar performance between the two groups and that the developed the program had no effect on the ability of reading comprehension and some aspects of theory of mind. Strong correlations were found between: the Cloze 2 and 3 and the reading subtest of the TDE, the Cloze 3 and the reading subtest of the TDE. Weak correlations between the scale of Theory of Mind, Cloze 3 and reading subtest of the TDE were found. The category of emotional terms was most frequent in both groups. However, the group of participants recalled a greater number of emotional terms that the non-participant group, indicating that the program may have influenced, in part, in the utilization of a more sophisticated repertoire of mental terms. The data suggest that both the profile of evaluation measures used as the factors related to individual and cultural experiences may have influenced the results.