School children with low birth weight inserted in system of Embu's education: construction of sentences

Abstract

The SG had fewer words compared to CG. The higher the birth weight, the higher the score test pattern. It was evident the age-related changes in morpho-syntactic skills addressed in the study, and protection factors mother's schooling and age had a positive impact on language performance.

Interpretação de ambiguidades de escolares de Embu das Artes (SP) nascidos com baixo peso

“…This finding is consistent with the literature, which reports that brain structures develop with age 13) . Our findings also corroborate studies that show that, with increasing age, children expand their metalinguistic skills to interpret ambiguities (13) , make inferences (21,28) , construct acts of speech (18,21) and of understanding of figurative language (13) , as well as their phonological awareness (28) . Metalinguistic skills are precursors to the acquisition of reading and writing (28) .…”

“…Another study (11) underscored the difficulty of individuals in accessing both meanings of homonymous words, which led them to verbally express only one of the meanings, that is, the one that was activated first, probably the most familiar. Studies addressing the relationship between semantic networks for the lexical access in the task of detection of ambiguities (13,14) and in the restrictions of the lexical process assigned to semantic features (14) have demonstrated that individuals born with low weight may present, later in life, semantic difficulties in receptive vocabulary (17) , differences in expressive language (18) , and deficits in semantic verbal fluency (19) , which would explain their difficulty in verbally expressing the ambiguous meanings of words given in oral sentences, observed in our SG. However, in the present study, we also observed that, regarding the score Number of Pictures (Table 1), the difference between the groups disappeared, that is, the groups presented equivalent results with the use of the visual facilitator.…”