A linguagem de livros infantis e infantojuvenis com personagens com a trissomia do cromossomo 21: estudo de alguns aspectos sociopsicolinguísticos da construção dos textos

Abstract

Learning is a process, a pathway with many journeys and it is normally not natural or spontaneous, it needs to be taught and stimulated. Each step of the reading will demand cognitive resources to achieve the main goal: the comprehension. Thus, text-intrinsic factors might require different levels of cognitive effort and, consequently, influence in comprehension. Because of this, in this research, having exploratory and descriptive character, the text receives highlight: the intention is to analyze some of its attributes, which may impact in the intelligibility and comprehension, such as lexical aspects and syntactic ones. To do so, children and young people books were chosen, written in Brazilian Portuguese, supposedly addressed to readers who are in the initial phase of literacy (around seven years old). Another cutout was the option for books which, somehow, represent issues related to inclusion of disabled people. Thus, the choice was made by books with characters with Trisomy 21. The corpus is integrated by 23 books. The goal of this research is to analyze the characteristics of language used in the texts of children and young people literature (written in Brazilian Portuguese or translated ones) with Trisomy 21, considering indicators of lexical density, syntactic complexity and vocabulary, in order to contribute to studies of reading comprehension. With this purpose, having as basement the pedagogic lexicography and applied psycholinguistic, we aimed at identifying and analyzing the vocabulary used. In order to corroborate with the aspects of the studied lexical items selection, the lexical density and syntactic complexity were calculated in the corpus based on Eggins’ (2004) theory, from Systemic-Functional Theory to, this way, present the characteristics of language verified in the books. The results raised from data and analysis implemented corroborate to consolidate the thesis that the three factors, hereby studied, are important indicators to estimate of the intelligibility (readability) and the complexity of processes in reading comprehension. In its set, it is possible to realize that the books might result in different impacts to reading comprehension, depending on the level of cognitive effort and processing required, taking into account linguistic and socio psycholinguistic aspects. Thus, at least part of these books must be taken into account in choosing and using this set of books.