Angela M. V. Pinheiro
Department of Psychology, Federal University of Minas Gerais,
UFMG, Brazil
Competent reading performance of 4th grade Scottish and Brazilian children
was compared. The reading performance of the two samples was assessed by
a word and non-word test (the words varied in levels of familiarity, regularity
and length and the non-words in length). The main objective of the work
was the establishment of parameters of efficient reading performance which
was taken as reference to the identification of areas of inefficiencies
among Brazilian competent readers and also to compare the performance of
these children with the performance of the English speaking counterparts
to discover the aspects of the reading process that are common to the processing
of information regardless of language differences, educational and social-cultural
influences and the aspects that are orthography-specific. The main finding
of this work is that the theory of English reading processes, can with
few exceptions be applied to explain the reading processes in Portuguese.
Competent reading in the two languages showed similarities in regard to
time processing and error rates for the reading of words and non-words
and mainly differed in terms of the generality of the regularity
effect and of the rate of letter processing for words and for non-
words.