Compreensão infantil da ironia em livros de histórias e sua importância para o desenvolvimento sociocognitivo

Abstract

Ability to understand mental states like intentions, desires, beliefs and emotions is known in literature as theory of mind. This ability allows children to understand and predict the behavior of others and themselves, one of the guides for social cognitive child development. Studies involving the relationship between theory of mind and language have shown the potential of story books as a source of knowledge and understanding of mental states since different aspects are identified in the content of the stories such as situations of differing beliefs of reality, irony and situations involving social clues. In socio-cognitive perspective, irony is an aspect of relevance because it provides information on the minds and subjective experiences using a subtle perspective into thoughts, other people's desires and feelings, having a beneficial effect in improving children's understanding of mental states. This study investigated the understanding of irony contained in two children's story books (L1 and L2), differing in the level of complexity of irony contained in the narrative in 61 preschool children from 5-6 years-old from a private educational school system of a city in the state Minas Gerais. The evaluation was performed individually, starting with the Auditory Vocabulary Test (TVAud) to assess receptive and expressive language and to identify possible linguistic differences between groups of children with the same age group. Posteriorly, there was the oral reading of each book to the child and were applied one reading comprehension task and four comprehension tasks of the respective irony to every story. The results showed a positive correlation between reading comprehension and the understanding of irony in the L1 story. It was found that children in both age groups and genders didn´t diverge in the level of understanding of irony in the two books, and presented a satisfactory understanding of irony contained in L1 and a partial understanding of irony contained in L2. It is expected that the results can further enhance research about this thematic, still scarce, both in the national and international context. It is expected that the results will provide grants for educational development actions on ways to use the story books and exploration of irony present in the narratives as well as reinforcing the need for reader activities to be valued and systematically integrated into the school curriculum as a methodology that would improve the practice of professionals working in education.