Consciência metalingüística e a ortografia de palavras morfologicamente complexas

Abstract

Recent studies have investigated the contribution of metalinguistic awareness in reading and spelling. Among those, phonological awareness, defined as the ability to reflect upon the sounds of the words and, morphological awareness that can be defined as the ability to reflect upon the word’s morphemes. Phonological awareness helps writing because it helps the child to acquire the alphabetic principle. Less is known about the role of morphological processing in reading and spelling acquisition. Second and third year children of elementary school participate in this study. The children were tested on standardized tests and tasks of morphological awareness and phonological awareness. The study had two goals: to investigate the relationship between morphological awareness and phonological awareness and acquisition of reading and writing, and to investigate morphological processing and its relationship to the phonological structure of words in Brazilian Portuguese. It was possible to detect a significant correlation between phonological awareness for reading and spelling. The contribution of morphological awareness for reading was somewhat independent to phonological awareness. For spelling there was no significant contribution of metalinguistic awareness. For children of this age group there was no evidence found for significant correlations between morphological processing and writing.