Competência lexical na proficiência do professor de inglês como língua estrangeira: uma análise do teste oral do epple

Pós-graduação em Estudos Linguísticos - IBILCE

Desempenho de escolares com e sem dificuldades de aprendizagem de ensino particular em habilidade fonológica, nomeação rápida, leitura e escrita

OBJETIVOS: caracterizar e comparar o desempenho de escolares com e sem dificuldades de aprendizagem no ensino particular em habilidades fonológicas, nomeação rápida, leitura e escrita. MÉTODOS: participaram desse estudo 60 escolares de 2ª a 4ª séries de escola de ensino particular, distribuídos em 6 grupos, sendo cada grupo composto por 10 escolares, sendo 3 grupos de escolares com dificuldades de aprendizagem e 3 grupos de escolares sem dificuldades de aprendizagem. Como procedimentos, foram realizadas a prova de nomeação automática rápida, a de consciência fonológica e a prova de leitura oral e escrita sob ditado. RESULTADOS: os resultados desse estudo evidenciaram desempenho superior dos escolares sem dificuldades de aprendizagem em relação àqueles com dificuldades. Os escolares com dificuldades de aprendizagem apresentaram maior relação velocidade/tempo em tarefas de nomeação e, conseqüentemente, desempenho inferior em tarefas de consciência fonológica e leitura e escrita de palavras isoladas quando comparados aos sem dificuldades de aprendizagem. CONCLUSÃO: os escolares com dificuldades de aprendizagem apresentaram comprometimento na relação entre as capacidades de nomeação e automatização dos estímulos apresentados com a capacidade de acesso lexical, discriminação visual, freqüência de uso dos estímulos e competição para a apresentação do menor tempo possível na nomeação dos códigos necessários para o estabelecimento do mecanismo de conversão fonema-grafema, exigido para a realização da leitura e escrita em um sistema alfabético como o português.

Motor perseveration during an A not B task in children with intellectual disabilities

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)

Perseveration in congenitally blind children: Effects of luminous and acoustic targets on a modified A-not-B task

The purpose of this study was to determine whether or not blind children perseverate during a modified Piagetian A-not-B reaching task, with conditions that employ luminous AB targets and acoustic AB targets. Ten congenitally blind children, ages 1-4 years, with residual vision for light, took part in this study. Behavioral and kinematic data were computed for participants' reaches, performed in six A trials and in two B trials, in both stimulus conditions. All of the children perseverated in the luminous condition, and none of them perseverated in the condition using acoustic targets. The children tilted their heads in the direction of the target as they reached towards it. However, this coupling action (head-reaching) occurred predominantly in the A trials in the acoustic condition. In the luminous condition, in contrast to the acoustic condition, the children took longer times to initiate the reaching movement. Also, in the luminous condition, the children explored the target surroundings, unlike the acoustic condition, in which they reached straight ahead. For these blind children, sound was more relevant to reaching than was the luminous stimulus. The luminous input caused perseveration in congenitally blind children in a similar way that has been reported in the literature for typically-developing, sighted infants, ages 8-12 months, performing A-not-B tasks with visual inputs. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The role of vision in Parkinson's disease locomotion control: Free walking task

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)

As abordagens teóricas e os formalismos para o tratamento computacional do significado lexical

No âmbito do Processamento Automático de Línguas Naturais (PLN), o desenvolvimento de recursos léxico-semânticos é premente. Ao conceber os sistemas de PLN como um exercício de engenharia da linguagem humana, acredita-se que o desenvolvimento de tais recursos pode ser beneficiado pelos modelos de representação do conhecimento, desenvolvidos pela Engenharia do Conhecimento. Esses modelos, em particular, fornecem simultaneamente o arcabouço teórico-metodológico e a metalinguagem formal para o tratamento computacional do significado das unidades lexicais. Neste artigo, após a apresentação da concepção linguístico-computacional de léxico, elucidam-se os principais paradigmas de representação do conhecimento, enfatizando a abordagem do significado e a metalinguagem formal vinculadas a cada um deles.

Task demand effects on postural control in older adults

The literature shows conflicting results regarding older adults' (OA) postural control performance. Differing task demands amongst scientific studies may contribute to such ambiguous results. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine the performance of postural control in older adults and the relationship between visual information and body sway as a function of task demands. Old and young adults (YA) maintained an upright stance on different bases of support (normal, tandem and reduced), both with and without vision, and both with and without room movement. In the more demanding tasks, the older adults displayed greater body sway than the younger adults and older adults were more influenced by the manipulation of the visual information due to the room movement. However, in the normal support condition, the influence of the moving room was similar for the two groups. These results suggest that task demand is an important aspect to consider when examining postural control in older adults. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Reusability of dictionaries in the compilation of NLP lexicons

This paper discusses particular linguistic challenges in the task of reusing published dictionaries, conceived as structured sources of lexical information, in the compilation process of a machine-tractable thesaurus-like lexical database for Brazilian Portuguese. After delimiting the scope of the polysemous term thesaurus, the paper focuses on the improvement of the resulting object by a small team, in a form compatible with and inspired by WordNet guidelines, comments on the dictionary entries, addresses selected problems found in the process of extracting the relevant lexical information form the selected dictionaries, and provides some strategies to overcome them.

Effects of recovery type after a judo combat on blood lactate removal and on performance in an intermittent anaerobic task

Aim. The objective of this study was to verify the effects of active (AR) and passive recovery (PR) after a judo match on blood lactate removal and on performance in an anaerobic intermittent task (4 bouts of upper body Wingate tests with 3-min interval between bouts; 4WT).Methods. The sample was constituted by 17 male judo players of different competitive levels: A) National (Brazil) and International medallists (n. 5). B) State (São Paulo) medallists (n. 7). Q City (São Paulo) medallists (n. 5). The subjects were submitted to: 1) a treadmill test for determination of VO2peak and velocity at anaerobic threshold (VAT); 2) body composition; 3) a 5-min judo combat, 15-min of AR or PR followed by 4WT.Results. The groups did not differ with respect to: body weight, VO2peak, VAT, body fat percentage, blood lactate after combats. No difference was observed in performance between AR and PR, despite a lower blood lactate after combat (10 and 15 min) during AR compared to PR. Groups A and B performed better in the high-intensity intermittent exercise compared to athletes with lower competitive level (C).Conclusion. The ability to maintain power output during intermittent anaerobic exercises can discriminate properly judo players of different levels. Lactate removal was improved with AR when compared to PR but AR did not improve performance in a subsequent intermittent anaerobic exercise.

The influence of visual stimuli in ethnobotanical data collection using the listing task method

The listing task, a method used in social and behavioral sciences, is frequently used in ethnobotanical research to constructfolk taxonomies and select relevant itemsfor subsequent research. The objective of the present study was to determine whether visual stimuli are associated with responses to the theme plants or if context influences the answers. Interviews were conducted with 400 women in Rio Claro, São Paulo, Brazil, in four different locations: three with a visible presence of plants (a plant store, a supermarket, and a public plaza) and one with no plants (a street corner in the center of the city). The women were asked to name plants. Analysis indicates that visual stimuli influenced responses and that this is more marked in the plant store than in the other locations. The plants cited most often-roses, orchids, ferns, violets, and daisies-were, with little variation, the same in all the locales studied.