Repositório RCAAP

Reports of an advantage of bilingualism on brain structure in young adult participants are inconsistent. Abutalebi et al. (2012) reported more efficient monitoring of conflict during the Flanker task in young bilinguals compared to young monolingual speakers. The present study compared young adult (mean age = 24) Cantonese-English bilinguals in Hong Kong and young adult monolingual speakers. We expected (a) differences in metabolites in neural tissue to result from bilingual experience, as measured by 1H-MRS at 3T, (b) correlations between metabolic levels and Flanker conflict and interference effects (c) different associations in bilingual and monolingual speakers. We found evidence of metabolic differences in the ACC due to bilingualism, specifically in metabolites Cho, Cr, Glx and NAA. However, we found no significant correlations between metabolic levels and conflict and interference effects and no significant evidence of differential relationships between bilingual and monolingual speakers. Furthermore, we found no evidence of significant differences in the mean size of conflict and interference effects between groups i.e. no bilingual advantage. Lower levels of Cho, Cr, Glx and NAA in bilingual adults compared to monolingual adults suggest that the brains of bilinguals develop greater adaptive control during conflict monitoring because of their extensive bilingual experience.

In recent years, Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) has received a great deal of attention, as it may represent a pre-clinical state of Alzheimer´s disease (AD). In the distinction between healthy elderly (CTL) and MCI patients, automated discourse analysis tools have been applied to narrative transcripts in English and in Brazilian Portuguese. However, the absence of sentence boundary segmentation in transcripts prevents the direct application of methods that rely on these marks for the correct use of tools, such as taggers and parsers. To our knowledge, there are only a few studies evaluating automatic sentence segmentation in transcripts of neuropsychological tests. The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact ofthe automatic sentence segmentation method DeepBond on nine syntactic complexity metrics extracted of transcripts of CTL and MCI patients.

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The inverse relationship of orphanhood between mother and child is developed in this story by Fábio de Melo. In a symbolic, deep and artisan way, the author creates an intimate narrative, rich in details, critical about death, from the point of view of who is left, of the mother who, losing the child, loses her “function”. This article views the familiar and intimate relationship as one of the themes of contemporary literature.

This article explores the ways in which historians have thought about biography as a genre of writing about the past and how these attitudes have changed over the last fifty years or so, from skepticism and even hostility to increasing acceptance and even advocacy. It also examines some of the ways in which biography itself has evolved and the contribution of historians to this evolution, before concluding with an example from the author’s forthcoming biography of the 19th-century Spanish military and political figure Baldomero Espartero (1793-1879).

The article reflects on the patterns of objectivity in which contemporary biographical writing moves. Relying on Thomas Khun distinguishes between those built from the direct knowledge of the biography of those who start from an indirect approach, either by the lack of synchrony in the times of biographer and biographed, or because part of a prior will of distancing. From the general conditions, the article begins to reflect on the evolution of the biography in Spain and its conditions of evolution up to the present.

Besides proposing in outline form the disparities of the biographies of Cervantes,Ortega y Gasset and Ridruejo, the article defends the condition of a specific requirement – the moral imagination – as an instrument to recreate the inner complexity of the subjects studied, beyond the empirical reliability of public and private documentation handled.

For a long time the biography produced in Britain has constituted an international benchmark. It has become the model that has inspired the style and methodology of a large number of professionals from other countries. But it has also transcended its borders, as British biographers have successfully written the biographies of key figures from other nationalities. In these pages we shall briefly review the development of the genre from the eighteenth century to the present day, addressing issues such as: its internal fluctuations, some of its milestones and main authors, its relationship with the academic world, its institutionalization after the so called biographical turn, the cultural context in which it is rooted and, finally, some of the problems or challenges it has faced in recent years: among them its alleged crisis, the rivalry or coexistence with the new theories and perspectives of Life-Writing and its position in relation to new international focuses of biographical research and production.

Eufrásia Teixeira Leite (1840-1930) was a descendant of the Brazilian aristocracy, whose family fortune was gained with mining, coffee and stock investments. With no male siblings, she received an unusual education for women at that time. Once orphan, she was responsible for managing hers and her sister’s inheritance. This social and economic privileged position had its personal cost. The involvement with a pro-slavery abolition politician named Joaquim Nabuco (1849-1910) was limited to quick encounters and a long correspondence exchange. The impossibility of turning this passion into legal union is the subject of two recent novels, which compose this work’s corpus: Mundos de Eufrásia: a história de amor entre a incrível Eufrásia Teixeira Leite e o notável Joaquim Nabuco (2009), by Cláudia Lage, and Um mapa todo seu, by Ana Maria Machado (2015). The main goal of this approach is to apprehend the result of biographical data usage in the novel.

The existence of the printed matter depends on the life and work of booksellers,printers and editors. In the first decades of the 20th century, in Montevideo, thanks to a combination of several factors, some of those agents contributed to assert a literacy culture weak and wobbly. Among them, crucial figure was the italian Orsini Bertani (1869-1939) that active anarchist in their country of origin, in France, England and Argentina became a calm, fraternal and decisive cultural entrepreneur in the Uruguayan capital. Wonder about his days and chores helps to understand him and understand the culture of his time.

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The words of a text are not predetermined. The writer makes choices among the possibilities offered by the language. Linguistic development brings with it the increase of lexical, syntactic, semantic, and textual resources. Does this development draw a more direct path to the text, or does it activate a higher level of choices and decisions during writing? The current study analysed the evolution of the components of formulation and reformulation in the writing process of students attending Portuguese basic education. The data comes from the interaction between students of different years (2nd to 8th), organized in small groups, to write a text collaboratively. The analysis focused on the formulation/reformulation operations carried out during text construction. The results show an expansion of the possibilities considered, from the initial school years to the more advanced levels. This movement implies the need to reinforce the ability to rewrite and reformulate, in learning to write.

Models of proficient reading comprehension did not explain skill development. Connor’s model of the development of reading comprehension (CONNOR, 2016a), based on consistent empirical findings, brings together elements from previous models and, within the framework of the bioecological paradigm of child development, includes the social aspects of cognition and the instructional factor. In the present theoretical work we aim to detail Connor’s lattice model and the empirical studies that support it in order to: (1) highlight the theoretical advance that it represents in the understanding of the skill, by tracing a brief history of the models of reading comprehension; and (2) emphasize the clear educational implication: instruction is key to skill development, and will be effective to the extent that it is compatible with the learner’s linguistic and sociocognitive skills, that is, with individual differences, which implicates some degree of individualized instruction.

The purpose of this article is to verify the development of phonological awareness of French children throughout the preparatory course in two different teaching contexts. The study takes place in two primary schools, located close to the city of Grenoble-France. We verify such progress with 15 students from school A and 15 from B. The phonological awareness test (PAT) was used to assess the different levels of phonological awareness at the beginning and end of the school year. At the beginning of the year, students in class-B had better results in all the tasks of the PAT. We have observed no significant differences between the two groups at the end of the year. It is possible that the educational and pedagogical context of the two classes played an essential role in this result because the teaching of class A is the one that reinforces more the training of phonological awareness. 

The aim of this paper is to present the instrument AFLeT (Textual Reading Fluency Assessment) and one of its validity studies (correlation with other tests that evaluate theoretically related constructs). The instrument main characteristic is its comprehensiveness of reading evaluation, once the AFLeT covers reading fluency in all its dimensions, i.e. the processing of decoding, prosody, speed, and reading comprehension. The normative sample was composed of 200 Brazilian children from 7 to 10 years old, students from 2nd to the 4th year of the Elementary School in public and private schools in Rio Grande do Sul. The results of one of the psychometric studies have shown that the scores in AFLeT are significantly correlated with performance in tasks that measure concepts theoretically related to reading fluency (reading of words and pseudowords and rapid serial naming).

The aim of this study is to analyze lexical disambiguation during reading comprehension in English as a foreign language (EFL). It is known that in order to disambiguate a word the reader usually relies on the context, thus, the research is theoretically based on the definition of context, and counts on a lexical theory named Lexical Quality Hypothesis (HQL) that explains how the characteristics of a word (phonology and semantics, for example) are a fundamental part of reading comprehension. This study integrates a larger project still in progress, however, a case study is presented in order to analyze the ambiguity in the words record and track in different contexts of use. Preliminary results show that the characteristics of words, as well as the different types of context, are not unrelated to the phenomenon of disambiguation, although the reader is not always aware of the need to disambiguate even he/she understands what was read.

This article considers reading as a complex cognitive activity, with characteristics of a subsystem which is part of a larger dynamic system called language. In this perspective, reading is seen as a complex emergence resulting from the actuation of several situated factors, such as, intra/intersubjective ones, psychological ones, corporeal ones, ecological ones, historical ones, sociocultural ones, among others, that interact in the flow of the process of reading comprehension and sense construction. Thus, we present a reading view focusing on the concepts and characteristics of Complex Adaptive Systems Theory (from now on SAC), namely, the concepts of system, subsystem, attractors, triggers and phase-spaces, trying to correlate them with the process of reading understanding. We focus mainly on demonstrating the aspects of reading which make it a complex adaptive subsystem and the flow of the attractors that direct the textual cues to a given state of system preference – phase states.