3 experiments are reported, all of which show the crucial importance of the “half” boundary in children's proportional judgments. In the first experiment 4‐, 5‐, 6‐, and 7‐year‐old children had to judge which of 2 boxes of blue and white bricks was represented in a small picture. The proportion of blue to white bricks was different in the 2 boxes, and the question was whether the children could use these proportions to make their choices. The 6‐ and 7‐year‐old children solved the problem much more successfully when the proportions crossed the “half” boundary (e.g., 3/8 blue vs. 5/8 blue). The second experiment showed that discriminations involving half (e.g., 1/2 blue vs. 1/4 blue) are also easier than those that do not cross the “half” boundary for the 6‐ and 7‐year‐olds. The third experiment confirmed the results of the first 2 with pictures of different absolute sizes from each other. We conclude that “half” plays a crucial role in children's early proportional reasoning, and that the “half” boundary is to some extent similar to, though not as powerful as, the category boundaries discovered in speech perception.

Although narrative competence has long been regarded as an important linguistic skill, little is known about the effect of experimental variations on children's narrative capabilities. This study investigated developmental changes in story-telling ability and how this ability is affected by experimental variations. The performance of 4-, 6-and 8-year-old Italian and English children was compared in four storytelling tasks. In a picture-elicited story production, children were asked to create a story from a drawing (Task 1) and from three cards sequentially arranged (Task 2). In a free story production, children were asked to tell a story (Task 3) and to dictate a story to the experimenter (Task 4). The stories were classified according to levels of narrative competence and compared across ages and samples. The results show that experimental variations have a strong effect on children's story-telling abilities. A similar pattern of development was found in English and Italian children although some differences in performance were noted.The present study focuses on a particular type of narrative: oral stories told by children. Telling stories represents literate school-related genre within the experience of the preschool child (Guttman & Frederiksen, 1985) and it reflects the organization and conventions of written discourse produced at an oral level (Teberosky, 1985). Also, oral stories have been identified as an effective recourse for studying the development of narrative skills (Rego,

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Previous studies showed that 6-year-old children can make proportional judgements when the first-order relations are accessible to them and that children use the half boundary in order to make such judgements. In these studies "half" proved to be an important boundary in children's initial understanding of proportion. These studies involved non-numerical tasks (continuous quantities) in which proportional judgements were established on the basis of part-part relations (ratio). This raises a question about ratio comparisons that are numerically represented (discontinuous quantities). Would children again use the half boundary in ratio comparisons between continuous and discontinuous quantities? In this experiment 6-to 8-year olds were given two tasks: In the sliced task, the standard and the choices were discontinuous quantities; in the non-sliced task, the standard was a continuous quantity and the choices were discontinuous quantities. Children's justifications reflected different levels of understanding of proportions and characteristics of the tasks. The results revealed that "dhalf" plays a crucial role in children's proportional reasoning even when discontinuous quantities are involved.

O presente artigo, de natureza teórica e com base em pesquisas realizadas com crianças, discute as complexas relações entre consciência metalinguística e compreensão leitora a partir da consciência fonológica, da consciência morfológica e da consciência metatextual. A consciência fonológica refere-se à habilidade de refletir acerca dos sons que compõem as palavras, auxiliando no processo de decodificação que, por sua vez, contribui para a compreensão de leitura. A consciência morfológica pode ser entendida como a habilidade de refletir sobre os morfemas, que são as menores unidades linguísticas que têm significado próprio. O que se observa é que a informação relativa à decodificação interage com informações sintático-semânticas oriundas do conhecimento que o leitor possui acerca da morfologia da língua, contribuindo para a leitura de textos. A consciência metatextual refere-se à habilidade de refletir sobre as propriedades dos textos. Diferentemente da consciência fonológica e morfológica, as relações entre a consciência metatextual e a compreensão leitora não são tão claras, havendo resultados divergentes quanto à contribuição do conhecimento sobre as propriedades do texto para a compreensão textual. O entendimento dessas relações permite construir um quadro teórico a respeito do papel da consciência metalinguística, seja em relação ao fonema, ao morfema ou às propriedades do texto, na compreensão textual; bem como extrair implicações educacionais acerca da aprendizagem da leitura.

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ResumoO presente artigo examina a influência da escolaridade e do contexto de produção textual na escrita de histórias por crianças das primeiras séries do Ensino Fundamental. Na primeira condição, as crianças produziram uma história inventada por elas. Na segunda, as crianças foram orientadas a reproduzirem por escrito um conto clássico infantil. As histórias foram classificadas segundo níveis distintos e crescentes de complexidade narrativa e de coerência. A escolaridade e as condições de produção influenciaram o estabelecimento da coerência textual, sendo que o efeito do contexto de produção sobre a escrita de história não foi o mesmo para todas as crianças. A sensibilidade ao contexto de produção estaria relacionada ao grau de domínio de um esquema narrativo de histórias apresentado pela criança. Palavras-chave: Linguagem Escrita; Narrativas; Estrutura do Texto. AbstractThis study examines the influence of schooling and the context of textual production on stories written by 1 st and 2 nd graders. In the first condition, children were asked to write original stories. In the second condition, they were asked to reproduce in writing a classical tale for children. The stories were classified according to the complexity and coherence of the narrative. Results indicate that schooling and condition of text production influenced the establishment of textual coherence. However, the effect of the contexts of textual production on children's writing was not the same for all children. Sensitivity to the contexts of text production seemed to have been related to children's awareness of narrative schema.

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