Validação de «jogos educativos digitais» para o desenvolvimento da consciência fonológica em crianças com NEE

Trabalho de Projeto apresentado à Escola Superior de Educação do Instituto Politécnico de Castelo Branco para cumprimento dos requisitos necessários à obtenção do grau de Mestre em Educação Especial – Domínio Cognitivo e Motor.

When do dialects become languages? A cognitive perspective

Several definitions exist that offer to identify the boundaries between languages and dialects, yet these distinctions are inconsistent and are often as political as they are linguistic (Chambers & Trudgill, 1998). A different perspective is offered in this thesis, by investigating how closely related linguistic varieties are represented in the brain and whether they engender similar cognitive effects as is often reported for bilingual speakers of recognised independent languages, based on the principles of Green’s (1998) model of bilingual language control. Study 1 investigated whether bidialectal speakers exhibit similar benefits in non-linguistic inhibitory control as a result of the maintenance and use of two dialects, as has been proposed for bilinguals who regularly employ inhibitory control mechanisms, in order to suppress one language while speaking the other. The results revealed virtually identical performance across all monolingual, bidialectal and bilingual participant groups, thereby not just failing to find a cognitive control advantage in bidialectal speakers over monodialectals/monolinguals, but also in bilinguals; adding to a growing body of evidence which challenges this bilingual advantage in non-linguistic inhibitory control. Study 2 investigated the cognitive representation of dialects using an adaptation of a Language Switching Paradigm to determine if the effort required to switch between dialects is similar to the effort required to switch between languages. The results closely replicated what is typically shown for bilinguals: Bidialectal speakers exhibited a symmetrical switch cost like balanced bilinguals while monodialectal speakers, who were taught to use the dialect words before the experiment, showed the asymmetrical switch cost typically displayed by second language learners. These findings augment Green’s (1998) model by suggesting that words from different dialects are also tagged in the mental lexicon, just like words from different languages, and as a consequence, it takes cognitive effort to switch between these mental settings. Study 3 explored an additional explanation for language switching costs by investigating whether changes in articulatory settings when switching between different linguistic varieties could - at least in part – be responsible for these previously reported switching costs. Using a paradigm which required participants to switch between using different articulatory settings, e.g. glottal stops/aspirated /t/ and whispers/normal phonation, the results also demonstrated the presence of switch costs, suggesting that switching between linguistic varieties has a motor task-switching component which is independent of representations in the mental lexicon. Finally, Study 4 investigated how much exposure is needed to be able to distinguish between different varieties using two novel language categorisation tasks which compared German vs Russian cognates, and Standard Scottish English vs Dundonian Scots cognates. The results showed that even a small amount of exposure (i.e. a couple of days’ worth) is required to enable listeners to distinguish between different languages, dialects or accents based on general phonetic and phonological characteristics, suggesting that the general sound template of a language variety can be represented before exact lexical representations have been formed. Overall, these results show that bidialectal use of typologically closely related linguistic varieties employs similar cognitive mechanisms as bilingual language use. This thesis is the first to explore the cognitive representations and mechanisms that underpin the use of typologically closely related varieties. It offers a few novel insights and serves as the starting point for a research agenda that can yield a more fine-grained understanding of the cognitive mechanisms that may operate when speakers use closely related varieties. In doing so, it urges caution when making assumptions about differences in the mechanisms used by individuals commonly categorised as monolinguals, to avoid potentially confounding any comparisons made with bilinguals.

A Grammar of Ts'ixa (Kalahari Khoe)

Ts’ixa is an endangered language of northern Botswana. It belongs to the Kalahari branch of the Khoe-Kwadi language family and is nowadays spoken by a small community of 200 individuals residing in the village of Mababe, Ngamiland. The internal affiliation of Ts’ixa within Kalahari Khoe is not clear, as the language displays affinities to both the western Kalahari Khoe language Khwe and the eastern Kalahari Khoe language Shua. The present work is the first attempt at providing a systematic description of Ts’ixa, based on phonological, morphological and syntactical features. Data from related Khoe languages, as well as from unrelated “Khoisan” languages of the Kx’a and Tuu families is used to locate Ts’ixa in both a genealogical and an areal framework. Findings suggest that Ts’ixa was shaped by a history of migration and contact between both related and unrelated languages, leading to a unique profile different from both Khwe and Shua, but with strong typological affinities to the Kalahari Basin as a linguistic area.

From illiteracy to literacy in adult- hood: A microlongitudinal study

Little is known about literacy acquisition in adults. Yet, our former studies suggest that the majority of the changes induced by literacy in children also occur in adulthood. Based on this observation as well as on what we know from developmental studies on reading acquisition, we designed an intensive literacy course in which each difficulty (either phono- logical or visual) of the alphabetic code is introduced in turn in lessons dedicated to overcoming it. We applied this course for 3 1∕2 months to 9 adult Portuguese illiterates. They were tested five times: two before starting the course (pre-tests), two during the course, and just after they completed the course. We tracked their evolution in reading and writing, metaphonology, memory for spoken nonwords, speech in noise perception, and visual abilities, including mirror-image discrimination. Most participants learned to read and write and showed associated enhancements in several domains, in particular in phonological skills.

ANÁLISE ENTONACIONAL DA LEITURA DE JORNALISTAS CHILENOS E ESPANHÓIS - SEMELHANÇAS E DIFERENÇAS NO NÚCLEO

This paper proposes to make an intonational comparison of the tonemes found in the Chilean and Spanish news broadcast reading, making a phonetic description and a phonological analysis.  The analysis is done from intonative phrases, which are limited by the complete sentence limited pauses.  Acoording to our point of view, intonative phrases are divided into three groups: continuative intonative phrases, internal intonative phrases and terminative intonative phrases, according to their position in the complete sentence.  Its objective is to find the convergent and divergent points between the two Spanish language varieties.  Its corpus is constituted of 12 sentences, recorded from the Chilean international channel TVN and  SpanishTVE, in 2001 August.  Twelve sentences are analyzed in total, six for each geographical origin, which were read by TV presenters when they read the news on the news broadcast.  The analysis are based on the Pierrehumbert's Autosegmental-Metric theory (AM) (1980), adapted to Spanish language by Sosa (1999).  As a result, not only the same tonal attribution for all the cases was found, but important differences when it comes to F0 behavior.  When considering the duration, also many differences were not found according to the predominant tendency; nonetheless, important differences related to the percentual value were observed.  As an example, we can consider terminative intonative phrases, where the observed pattern is L*L% both in Chile and Spain, but with soundless cases in the Spanish stressed vowel and post-stressed one, but just one case of a descendent movement in the Chilean stressed one.  Considering the duration, there is an increase  from the stressed from the pre-stressed and from the post-stressed to the stressed, but in different proportions: the increase is more perceived in the Chilean stressed vowel and in the Spanish post-stressed one.