Processo da compreensão leitora de crianças surdas

: diferenças semânticas : o surdo gestualista e o surdo oralista

Abstract

In order to live, interact or communicate the human being needs a language, oral or gestural, to if of acquire and perfect cognitive and linguistic social learning. In the case of deaf children is paramount important the interaction in a linguistic environment able to provide these children with an acquisition and development of or mother tongue. In a hearing society most deaf children have to know or even dominate Portuguese writing as a means to access knowledge and participation in society. However, compared to hearing children, teaching reading and writing can not be transmitted as their mother tongue, since they are deprived of the oral modality. It is critical the coupling that these two languages have in the lives of deaf children and students because communicating in Portuguese sign language and written Portuguese allows the student to grow in both languages as a first language and second respectively. The objective of this study is to observe the process of reading comprehension of deaf children, comparing deaf children who communicate through gestures and oralist deaf people since they are deprived of input – essential for the acquisition and development of language and communication and gradually increasing the capacity of the lexical field and meaning of words (semantics). The study focused on fourteen children attending bilingual classes and tried to realize how language learning is made. The analysis and data processing have been designed through direct observation in the classroom and the content of the interviews made by the multidisciplinary team working in a reference school for bilingual education. The results indicate us that there is a reduction and limitation in semantic abilities and learning problems in reading and writing in deaf children, because they are deprived of oral information and the grammatical structure of Portuguese Sign Language is different from the grammatical structure of written Portuguese.Compared deaf students who communicate through gestures to oralist deaf students, the latter show semantic and lexical increase because they have more access to orality, to meaning of the word and the difficulties are manifested mainly in the abstract while those using gestures have more difficulties in comprehension and expression, which limits more the lexical acquisition. However, we should note that the idea that every child has capacities, potentials and peculiarities from various factors (age of the implant, family, cognitive part, among others) that may or may not confirm the findings and conclusions presented here and that should always be weighted.

Date of Award	29 Jul 2014
Original language	Portuguese
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Filomena Ponte (Supervisor)