Performance de crianças falantes do Português Brasileiro no Test of Early Language Development (TELD-3)

Abstract

Many procedures are indicated to assess language development during childhood. Besides the diversity found, researchers of the area are unanimous in affirming the need to use formal and objective tests. In Brazil, there’s a lack of tests with this proposal. The main objective of this thesis was to verify the performance of typical Brazilian Portuguese-speaking children at the Test of Early Language Development-3 (TELD-3, Hresko, Reid and Hammill, 1999). Participated in this study 120 children, with ages between 2:0 and 7:11 years, distributed in age groups of 20 subjects each (10 male and 10 female). The thesis was divided in three studies. In Study I the Brazilian Portuguese translation of the TELD-3 was presented and the results obtained showed that the adopted procedures during the translation of the aforementioned test kept its equivalence with the original version, indicating no significant changes in content and format of the test, an important aspect for researches of this type. In Study II the performance of typical Brazilian Portuguesespeaking subjects on the test was analyzed. Results showed that the performance was compatible with the expected mean in all age groups, except for the fiveand six-year-old subjects on the expressive subtest of the Form B, that were classified as “below mean”. Besides, it was observed that the Forms A and B of the test were not equivalent among all age groups and there was an increase in the rough score values with the increase of chronological age. In Study III it was carried out a comparative analysis between the performances of English-speaking (USA) and Portuguese-speaking (Brazil) subjects in the aforementioned test. Results indicated that the groups had equivalent performances until the age of 4:11 years. Five-, sixand seven-year-old Portuguese-speaking subjects had higher scores on the receptive subtest of the Form A and on the expressive subtest of the Form B, and fiveand six-year-olds had lower general scores than English-speaking subjects. As a conclusion, the results of the presented studies, taken together, seem to indicate that the Brazilian Portuguese version of the TELD-3 is sensitive to characterize the language performance of the studied population. Further researches are necessary regarding the sensitivity and specificity of the test.