LINGUISTIC PREDICTORS OF LITERACY IN LOW-INCOME PRESCHOOL CHILDREN
children; kindergarten; literacy; reading; low income
Purpose: To characterize the performance profile of linguistic predictors of literacy of low-income preschool children in the public school system in the city of Natal. Method: A observational, cross-sectional, descriptive and correlational study approved by the Research Ethics Committee of the University Hospital Onofre Lopes (CEP HUOL) of a public university under number 2.440.976. The sample consisted of 96 preschoolers enrolled in level IV of the kindergarten, with average age of six years. The linguistic skills phonological discrimination, phonology, vocabulary, phonological awareness, rapid automatic naming, phonological working memory and letter recognition were evaluated by means of specific protocols and a socioeconomic and cultural questionnaire was applied with parents to investigate environmental factors. The SPSS Statistics 20 software was used for statistical analysis. For inferential analysis, Spearman's Correlation Test, Mann-Whitney Test and the Kruskal-Wallis Test were used. The level of statistical significance adopted for all inferential analysis tests was p≤0.05. Results: The study participants presented lower than expected performance in expressive vocabulary, phonological awareness, rapid automatic naming, phonological working memory and letter recognition. In relation to the development of phonology, the phonological process simplification of consonantal meeting was the most frequent, appearing in more than 25% of its possibilities of occurrence in 21 children of the sample.