The phonological and visual basis of developmental dyslexia in Brazilian Portuguese reading children

Evidence from opaque languages suggests that visual attention processing abilities in addition to phonological skills may act as cognitive underpinnings of developmental dyslexia. We explored the role of these two cognitive abilities on reading fluency in Brazilian Portuguese, a more transparent orthography than French or English. Sixty-six children with developmental dyslexia and normal Brazilian Portuguese children participated. They were administered three tasks of phonological skills (phoneme identification, phoneme, and syllable blending) and three visual tasks (a letter global report task and two non-verbal tasks of visual closure and visual constancy). Results show that Brazilian Portuguese children with developmental dyslexia are impaired not only in phonological processing but further in visual processing. The phonological and visual processing abilities significantly and independently contribute to reading fluency in the whole population. Last, different cognitively homogeneous subtypes can be identified in the Brazilian Portuguese population of children with developmental dyslexia. Two subsets of children with developmental dyslexia were identified as having a single cognitive disorder, phonological or visual; another group exhibited a double deficit and a few children showed no visual or phonological disorder. Thus the current findings extend previous data from more opaque orthographies as French and English, in showing the importance of investigating visual processing skills in addition to phonological skills in children with developmental dyslexia whatever their language orthography transparency.

The Automatic Mapping of Princeton WordNet Lexical-Conceptual Relations onto the Brazilian Portuguese WordNet Database

Princeton WordNet (WN.Pr) lexical database has motivated efficient compilations of bulky relational lexicons since its inception in the 1980's. The EuroWordNet project, the first multilingual initiative built upon WN.Pr, opened up ways of building individual wordnets, and interrelating them by means of the so-called Inter-Lingual-Index, an unstructured list of the WN.Pr synsets. Other important initiative, relying on a slightly different method of building multilingual wordnets, is the MultiWordNet project, where the key strategy is building language specific wordnets keeping as much as possible of the semantic relations available in the WN.Pr. This paper, in particular, stresses that the additional advantage of using WN.Pr lexical database as a resource for building wordnets for other languages is to explore possibilities of implementing an automatic procedure to map the WN.Pr conceptual relations as hyponymy, co-hyponymy, troponymy, meronymy, cause, and entailment onto the lexical database of the wordnet under construction, a viable possibility, for those are language-independent relations that hold between lexicalized concepts, not between lexical units. Accordingly, combining methods from both initiatives, this paper presents the ongoing implementation of the WN.Br lexical database and the aforementioned automation procedure illustrated with a sample of the automatic encoding of the hyponymy and co-hyponymy relations.

Um estudo sintático-semântico das preposições em complementos verbais de webjornais paulistas

The main goal of this work is to evaluate the realization of the linguistic phenomenon of preposition and also to investigate how current normative pressures influence the production and the perception of processes of variation and change in Brazilian Portuguese. We analyze the use of prepositions a and para in verbal complementation contexts in contemporary journalistic texts from São Paulo’s press – the web newspapers. The contexts considered are constructions with complements of direction, movement with transference, material transference, and verbal/perceptual predicators (Berlinck, 1996; Corrêa, Cançado, 2006). Because written texts tend to be more conservative (i.e. more normative) this research provides an important linguistic investigation that contributes to the sociolinguistic knowledge of the language. However, the newspapers also tend to reflect the use, so they constitute a privileged place for us to understand the conflicting relationship between ‘norm’ and ‘use’. Besides this, the research is relevant for General Linguistics for considering linguistic and extralinguistic factors which determine the use and frequency of the prepositions, like syntactic-semantic relations between the preposition, the verb, the complement, and the text genre. We collected data from web newspapers from Araraquara, with small and medium circulation. Based on previous results, we have ascertained the predominance of the use of the preposition a in the newspapers from São Paulo in the 20th century. However, we have also ascertained representative records of variation... (Complete abstract click electronic access below)

Preposições em textos do gênero notícia na imprensa paulista: norma e uso no ínicio do século XX

This paper proposes a reflection on processes of variation and change that occurred with the portuguese prepositions a, ate, em and para, taken as a parameter for answers in a broader context, the confrontation between the norm and use and between standard and linguistic variation. We conducted the study based on a corpus composed of all occurrences of the prepositions in question removed news of the newspaper O Combate and O Estado de Sao Paulo. Whereas the main objective of the study is to present and describe the use of these particles in newspaper articles of the Imprensa Paulista, data were collected and quantified by using the statistical package GOLDVARB, and interpretation of results relied (i) assumptions regarding the process variation in the use of prepositions and prepositions replace weak, as the preposition to, for strong prepositions (para, em, até), (ii) in comparison with the grammatical rule in effect at the time, (iii) and in the search for the existence of some historical factor that justifies the selection of a preposition rather than another. Among the hypotheses, we investigate the relationship between these prepositions and whose kind of preachers they introduce supplements: the direction of motion (abstract or concrete) or transfer (material and verbal / perceptual). This theoretical perspective was the Labovian sociolinguistics (Labov, 1972, 1994), which defines the linguistic variable as a representation of two or more different ways to convey a certain information content, being necessary to define it the following criteria set exact number of variants to establish all the multiplicity of contexts in which it appears; develop a quantitative index for measuring the values of variables

Instrumentos e atividades realizadas para a coleta de um corpus de aprendizes em língua inglesa para integrar o Br-ICLE (The Brazilian Portuguese Sub-corpus of ICLE)

This paper presents and discusses initiatives taken in a public university in the state of São Paulo in order to collect and organize a corpus composed of argumentative texts to be part of Br-ICLE – a subcorpus of ICLE1 – which is composed of texts produced by Brazilian students enrolled in the courses of Arts and Languages and Translation. The discussion is based on a three-year project in which we could observe underuse and overuse features in the texts produced by Brazilian undergraduate students.

Educational and professional background and success in the labor market: the case of Portuguese immigrants in the Netherlands

The aim of this paper is to describe the relationship between educational and professional occupation trajectories of Portuguese immigrants in The Netherlands. To this end, the sample used comprises Portuguese immigrants that arrived in The Netherlands in two periods which represent the highest influx of immigrants: around the years 1966 and 2002. The analysis of the data shows a strong relationship between the level of professional education and the level of professional occupation. Furthermore, some exceptions to the generalizations found show that in service training may lead to an improvement of the possibilities to ascend regarding the level of professional occupation.

Brazilian portuguese wordNet: a computational linguistic exercise of encoding bilingual relational lexicons

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)

A crítica ensaística de Osman Lins sobre o acesso do jovem escolar à cultura brasileira

This text aims to address the critical essays of Osman Lins on the corpus of his works, reading and study, which consists of Portuguese textbooks adopted in schools for the teaching of the national language in the Secondary Course. More specifically, we intend to reflect on how Osman Lins analyzes the procedures adopted by the authors of these textbooks to introduce learners into Brazilian literature. Our object of study and analysis is restricted to six trials Lins published originally in 1965, the newspaper of Pernambuco University Press and later, in 1977, were collected in the form of the first chapter, titled "The Book didactic - First time: 1965 " (1977, p.13-40), the book From the Dream and Glory: Brazilian uncultural problems.

Prevalence of physical activity through the practice of sports among adolescents from Portuguese speaking countries

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)

Electromyographic validation of the trapezius and serratus anterior muscles in military press exercises with open grip

It was studied the trapezius muscle and serratus anterior muscle in 24 male volunteers using a 2-channel TECA TE 4 electromyograph and Hewlett Packard surface electrodes, during the execution of four different modalities of military press exercises with open grip. The results showed that TS acted significantly in the modalities standing and sitting press behind neck, while SI acted in all the modalities, i.e., standing and sitting press behind neck and forward, justifying their inclusion as basic exercises for physical conditioning programmes.

Núcleo mídia press: um núcleo de pesquisa na internet

The researching centre mentioned was conceived em 1989, with the goal to study and implement the media of comunication by creating and effecting online printed medias for care institutions, schools and UNESP. The university has taken a give-and-take function between itself and the society. The founder of this group is Prof. Dr. Ricardo Nicola that since 1996 has established a link between university and society, using this centre for developing works that go over the university's borders. The group's work comprehends four different classes: literary , tecnical, journalism and advanced research . The literary one involves help and literary production for new authors, the tecnical helps in publishing theses; the journalism one is related to journal and medias in and out of the university; the advanced research one has is caracterized as a class between departments and branches.