O domínio das orações adjectivas em português europeu: desenvolvimento da linguagem (típico e atípico) e efeitos da escolarização

Esta dissertação investiga os efeitos do desenvolvimento da linguagem ‒ típico (DTL) e atípico (ADL) ‒ e da escolarização na forma como as crianças compreendem e produzem as orações adjectivas restritivas de SU e de OD (ao centro e à direita), de Ind e de Loc (Ind e Loc apenas testadas na tarefa de repetição). A amostra foi constituída por 3 grupos de crianças – dos quais16 têm DTL do Pré-escolar; 13 são do 2.º ano básico com DTL e 7 têm ADL ‒ e por 1 grupo de adultos (o grupo de controlo) com 10 indivíduos. Através da aplicação das tarefas de representação e de repetição de Vasconcelos (1991) e da narrativa ‘A história do gato’, de Hickmann (1982), os resultados mostram a maior acessibilidade das adjectivas SU e OD à direita; elucidam-nos também sobre a importância que o processo de desenvolvimento linguístico e a escolarização têm para a temática. /ABSTRACT: This dissertation research the effects of typical (DTL) and atypical language development (LI), and the formal education system itself on the manner in which children understand and produce restrictive relative clauses of subject (SU) and direct object (DO) (center and right embedded), indirect object (Ind) and locative (Loc); Ind and Loc atested merely on construction tasks. The complete sample includes 3 groups of children - 16 pre-school with DTL; 13 in 2nd grade with DTL and 7 children diagnosed with LI - and 1 group of adults (control group)10 individuals. The results of representation and repetition exercises by Vasconcelos (1991) and the narrative of Hickmann’s ‘Cat story’ (1982) revealed that the majority of the participating children master more easily SU and OD clauses relative clauses with right association; and also important role of the language development process and of School for the matter.

A psicologia aplicada no treino de crianças em risco

This paper presents the answers of Psychology to three urgent tasks related to children at risk, namely, a theoretical comprehension on the origins of disorders, diagnosis procedures and treatment procedures for children with disorders. To attain these goals, the paper explains the concept of deviated development and the contributions of Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) for diagnosis and training of children at risk, as well as the work made by the author with slum children; some cases are shown. It is concluded that ABA techniques can be applied in the rehabilitation, training and special education of children with intellectual, sensorial or motor disabilities; these techniques are efficient and can be applied successfully by non professional persons. Finally, the paper proposes a model to teach Psychology in the special conditions of developing countries, uniting teaching, research and community service.

Social competence and emotional comprehension: How are they related in children?

The developmental progression of emotional competence in childhood provides a robust evidence for its relation to social competence and important adjustment outcomes. This study aimed to analyze how this association is established in middle childhood. For this purpose, we tested 182 Portuguese children aged between 8 and 11 years, of 3rd and 4th grades, in public schools. Firstly, for assessing social competence we used an instrument directed to children using critical social situations within the relationships with peers in the school context - Socially in Action-Peers (SAp) (Rocha, Candeias & Lopes da Silva, 2012); children were assessed by three sources: themselves, their peers and their teacher. Secondly, we assessed children’s emotional understanding, individually, with the Test of Emotion Comprehension (Pons & Harris, 2002; Pons, Harris & Rosnay, 2004). Relations between social competence levels (in a composite score and using self, peers and teachers’ scores) and emotional comprehension components (comprehension of the recognition of emotions, based on facial expressions; external emotional causes; contribute of desire to emotion; emotions based on belief; memory influence under emotional state evaluation; possibility of emotional regulation; possibility of hiding an emotional state; having mixed emotions; contribution of morality to emotion experience) were investigated by means of two SSA (Similarity Structure Analysis) - a Multidimensional Scaling procedure and the external variable as points technique. In the first structural analysis (SSA) we will consider self, peers and teachers’ scores on Social Competence as content variables and TEC as external variable; in the second SSA we will consider TEC components as content variables and Social Competence in their different levels as external variable. The implications of these MDS procedures in order to better understand how social competence and emotional comprehension are related in children is discussed, as well as the repercussions of these findings for social competence and emotional understanding assessment and intervention in childhood is examined.

Test of Emotion Comprehension: Exploring the underlying structure through Confirmatory Factor Analysis and Similarity Structure Analysis

Some decades of research on emotional development have underlined the contribution of several domains to emotional understanding in childhood. Based on this research, Pons and colleagues (Pons & Harris, 2002; Pons, Harris & Rosnay, 2004) have proposed the Test of Emotion Comprehension (TEC) which assesses nine domains of emotional understanding, namely the recognition of emotions, based on facial expressions; the comprehension of external emotional causes; impact of desire on emotions; emotions based on beliefs; memory influence on emotions; possibility of emotional regulation; possibility of hiding an emotional state; having mixed emotions; contribution of morality to emotional experiences. This instrument was administered individually to 182 Portuguese children aged between 8 and 11 years, of 3rd and 4th grades, in public schools. Additionally, we used the Socially in Action-Peers (SAp) (Rocha, Candeias & Lopes da Silva, 2012) to assess TEC’s criterion-related validity. Mean differences results in TEC by gender and by socio-economic status (SES) were analyzed. The results of the TEC’s psychometric analysis were performed in terms of items’ sensitivity and reliability (stability, test-retest). Finally, in order to explore the theoretical structure underlying TEC a Confirmatory Factor Analysis and a Similarity Structure Analysis were computed. Implications of these findings for emotional understanding assessment and intervention in childhood are discussed.

Using syntactic and semantic features for classifying mo- dal values in the portuguese language

This paper presents a study made in a field poorly explored in the Portuguese language – modality and its automatic tagging. Our main goal was to find a set of attributes for the creation of automatic tag- gers with improved performance over the bag-of-words (bow) approach. The performance was measured using precision, recall and F1. Because it is a relatively unexplored field, the study covers the creation of the corpus (composed by eleven verbs), the use of a parser to extract syntac- tic and semantic information from the sentences and a machine learning approach to identify modality values. Based on three different sets of attributes – from trigger itself and the trigger’s path (from the parse tree) and context – the system creates a tagger for each verb achiev- ing (in almost every verb) an improvement in F1 when compared to the traditional bow approach.