Testes de leitura e conhecimentos psicolinguísticos: chaves para sua utilização por psicólogos

Abstract

Psychological assessment plays a crucial role in clinical psychology, assisting in diagnosis and planning therapeutic interventions. It allows the psychologist to obtain a comprehensive understanding of the patient, including cognitive, emotional, behavioral and social aspects. Among the objects of psychological assessment is the reading activity and its cognitive processing. Assessment of reading skills is particularly important in clinical contexts, as reading difficulties can be associated with various disorders, such as dyslexia, learning disorders and emotional problems. For the psychological assessment of reading, different types of instruments are used, including tests. Reading tests are fundamental instruments used to assess one’s reading competence. They can encompass a variety of activities, including reading isolated words, sentences, or full texts, and answering comprehension questions. Its importance lies in its capability to subsidize the identification of reading disorders, such as dyslexia, and the assessment of specific abilities, such as decoding, fluency, and text comprehension. The results arising from them provide elements for psychologists to have a deeper understanding of an individual’s reading skills, allowing the development of tailored interventions and continuous monitoring of the progress. Hereof, the general goal of this work was to identify, in research conducted in Brazil, concerning reading assessment, between 2019 and 2023, the key psycholinguistic knowledge and linguistic consciousness skills for psychologists use in children's reading assessments, in the literacy phase. It is considered that for this research the focus is on psychologists; however, care for this knowledge must extend to every education or health professional who evaluates, analyses, treats and/or encourages reading in any age group. The chosen method was theoretical, bibliographic, and systematic review research, with a qualitative and exploratory approach. Based on the works selected for systematic review, especially in testing goals informed by the researchers, it was possible to identify that the psycholinguistic knowledge, fundamental for the psychologist to be able to use the reading tests utilized (in research or clinics), concern the alphabetic principle, decoding, fluency (speed and accuracy), the lexical access and syntactic computation; ad phonologic consciousness and metalinguistics have shown to be fundamental knowledge regarding linguistic consciousness. With these results, it’s possible to infer that the psychological reading assessment by psychologists is still a developing field, with few specific studies published in Brazil, between 2019 and 2023. The findings suggest that, despite the limitations, there is a rising interest in psychological reading assessment, which can encourage the development of new research and the creation of instruments more suited to the specificities of the Brazilian population