Original Paper Folia Phoniatr Logop 2014;66:58–66 DOI: 10.1159/000363764

Published online: November 14, 2014

Neuron Recycling for Learning the Alphabetic Principles Leonor Scliar-Cabral  Federal University of Santa Catarina, CNPq, Florianópolis, Brazil

Key Words Early literacy development · Visual neuron recycling · Phonemic awareness · Functional illiteracy · Scliar’s Early Literacy Development System

Abstract Aims: The main purpose of this paper is to discuss an approach to the phonic method of learning-teaching early literacy development, namely that the visual neurons must be recycled to recognize the small differences among pertinent letter features. In addition to the challenge of segmenting the speech chain and the syllable for learning the alphabetic principles, neuroscience has demonstrated another major challenge: neurons in mammals are programmed to process visual signals symmetrically. In order to develop early literacy, visual neurons must be recycled to overcome this initial programming together with phonological awareness, expanding it with the ability to delimit words, including clitics, as well as assigning stress to words. To achieve this goal, Scliar’s Early Literacy Development System was proposed and tested. Method: Sixteen subjects (10 girls and 6 boys) comprised the experimental group (mean age 6.02 years), and 16 subjects (7 girls and 9 boys) formed the control group (mean age 6.10 years). The research instruments were a psy-

© 2014 S. Karger AG, Basel 1021–7762/14/0662–0058$39.50/0 E-Mail [email protected] www.karger.com/fpl

chosociolinguistic questionnaire to reveal the subjects’ profile and a post-test battery of tests. At the beginning of the experiment, the experimental group was submitted to an intervention program based on Scliar’s Early Literacy Development System. One of the tests is discussed in this paper, the grapheme-phoneme test: subjects had to read aloud a pseudoword with 4 graphemes, signaled by the experimenter and designed to assess the subject’s ability to convert a grapheme into its correspondent phoneme. Results: The average value for the test group was 25.0 correct answers (SD = 11.4); the control group had an average of 14.3 correct answers (SD = 10.6): The difference was significant. Discussion: The experimental results validate Scliar’s Early Literacy Development System and indicate the need to redesign early literacy development methods. © 2014 S. Karger AG, Basel

Introduction

Neuropsychological Basis of Written Word Recognition The main purpose of this paper is to discuss an approach to the phonic method of learning-teaching early literacy development, namely that visual neurons must be Leonor Scliar-Cabral Department of Vernacular Language and Literature (DLLV) Federal University of Santa Catarina, CNPq Florianópolis SC (Brazil) E-Mail leonorscao @ gmail.com

recycled to recognize the small differences among pertinent letter features, to accomplish that difficult task. Dehaene [1] termed the ability of neuron learning ‘neuronal recycling’, resulting from ‘[...] the partial or total invasion of cortical territories initially assigned to a different function, by a new cultural object’ (p. 247). Apart from the challenge of segmenting the speech chain and the syllable for learning the alphabetic principles, neuroscience demonstrated yet another major one: neurons in mammals are programmed to process the visual signal symmetrically [2], since for survival it is economically efficient to disregard the differences that may eventually exist between cues to the left and to the right side, or between bottom and top for perceiving any object on sight: In Corballis and Beale’s model, the active maintenance of a symmetrical layout of the visual brain underlies our mirroring abilities. Their model assumes that we are born with a one-to-one array of visual connections linking the two hemispheres, and that learning mechanisms work constantly to preserve this initial symmetry … Collectively, inferior temporal neurons implement perceptual invariance: they allow us to recognize an object regardless of its size and location. The new electrophysiological data imply that left versus right also figures among the irrelevant distinctions that are systematically neglected by our ventral visual system [1, pp. 275, 278].

This innate property was experimentally demonstrated [3]: the identification of objects is independent of the different spaces they occupy or of the position in which they appear, like a chair turned to the left, to the right, or even upside down. But this is not the case for the recognition of letters; neurons must learn how to recognize these small differences, which are totally pertinent for learning how to read. I speculate that one must go beyond the mirror stage to become an expert reader – we have to ‘unlearn’ our spontaneous competence for mirror image generalization. But how? The distinction between left and right probably begins in the dorsal visual pathway that programs gestures in space. When children trace letters, they associate each one with a distinct gesture. Progressively, this spatial and motor learning is transferred to the ventral visual pathway for object recognition. Young learners learn to attend to shape orientation. They begin to see letters as 2-dimensional curves rather than 3-dimensional shapes that can rotate in space. Progressively, they become proficient at spotting groups of letters … That it takes a normal child several months to unlearn mirror image generalization strongly supports the neuronal recycling hypothesis [1, pp. 293–294].

Pedagogical activities to recycle visual neurons for the purpose of breaking symmetric processing consist of triggering left dorsal parietal neurons, which are sensitive to left and right directional movement differences. The reNeuron Recycling

sult of these activities is transmitted to left occipitotemporal ventral neurons. Montessori inspired these activities, which consist of instructions given to children to follow letter trace directions with a finger, and to emit simultaneously the sound corresponding to the relation grapheme/phoneme. In so doing, reading neurons learn to recognize the feature direction that contrasts one letter to the other(s) (neuronal recycling) and to assign the appropriate phonological value to each grapheme (phonological awareness). These practices ensured the success of the world’s most recognized program to eradicate functional illiteracy, the program Early Intervention Initiative [4]. The need for breaking symmetric processing is heightened in the case of mirroring letters like b/d, p/q, b/p, d/q, n/u and a/e. Cornell [5] showed that ‘almost all children, around the age of 5, go through a stage where they seem to be equally competent at writing in both directions’. Gradually, children diminish mirroring writing in favor of a normal one, a process that ends when they are 8 years old. Due to human neuron plasticity, neurons can be recycled; however, the context of teaching and learning must be modified, otherwise students will continue to show their initial symmetric processing and may be diagnosed with dyslexia. During the first year of learning alphabetic principles, the Visual Word Form Area appears in the left occipitotemporal ventral area, as demonstrated during neuroscience experiments [6] and other neuroscience studies [7, 8]. During the course of learning how to read, neurons located in this region must learn how to block the brain mechanisms underlying mirror generalization in favor of recognizing relevant differences among feature directions, when processing written words. The breakdown of symmetric processing takes place only for written word recognition. Tasks to Be Learned by Reading Neurons Neurons located in the left fusiform visual word form area should learn the following tasks: recognizing the spatial and font invariance of letter features, recomposing the features into one or more letters to form the graphemes, linking of graphemes to their sonorous values (the phonemes), and successively recognizing the visual representation of word syllables and morphemes together with their sonorous values. Spatial invariance means that no matter where words are presented, e.g. to the left or to the right side of the screen, due to the mediation by the corpus callosum, the output of this processing converges to the left occipitotemporal ventral region, the sole space where visual neuFolia Phoniatr Logop 2014;66:58–66 DOI: 10.1159/000363764

59

rons are specialized for written word recognition. Font invariance means that processing letters involves ‘the ability to rapidly build up an abstract representation of letter strings invariant for irrelevant parameters such as font, case, size or location’ [9]. Only the left occipitotemporal ventral region operates with the font invariance, that is with more abstract constructs, which are crucial for attributing the same values to letters that in different fonts do not share any feature, for instance A and a, G and g, M and m. The abstract representation of letter strings is preceded by recognizing invariant letter features, exemplified by those in the Roman alphabet [10]. Letter Invariant Features The following are the invariant features that are used in printed fonts (some letters are formed by only one feature, for instance uppercase letters I, C and O and lowercase letters l, c and o.) The most basic features that form the letters are straight lines and curves, combined into smaller differences, as described below. Position of the Straight Line: Vertical, Horizontal or Inclined. For instance, the letter E shows a vertical straight line and 3 horizontal ones, while the letter V shows 2 inclined straight lines. Size of the Straight Line. The horizontal straight lines are always shorter than the vertical ones, preserving each size in the same font. Compare, for instance, the sizes in the following letters: E, F, H, L and T. Relations among Features in the Same Letter. Relations may be among straight lines (in different positions) or among curved and mixed lines. The place of the smaller straight lines may vary in relation to the main axis and how many there are. Therefore, the sole difference between E and F consists of the fact that E has one more straight line at the bottom, and both letters are different from L because the latter has only one horizontal straight line at the bottom. In the case of the letter T, the vertical straight line touches at the top just at the middle of the horizontal straight line, while in the case of H, the 2 parallel vertical straight lines are linked at their middle by a horizontal one. In conclusion, these 5 capital letters articulate exactly 2 features, with the sole difference being the way they relate, and how many times they are repeated – L, T, F, E, H. An example of relations between curves is the letter S (both upper- and lowercase), where the curve c is mirrored top down and right to left. This grapheme presents additional challenges, since it may represent different phonemic values. The most common are the mixed relations. For example, the sole difference among the following letters is a small curve articulated with a 60

Folia Phoniatr Logop 2014;66:58–66 DOI: 10.1159/000363764

straight vertical line, at the bottom, top, left or right of the letter, combined with a semicircle, repeated or cut by a very small horizontal straight line: J, a, f, g, h, j, m, n, r, t and u. Orientation of the Letter. This last feature is the most difficult one to recognize, since the perception of this difference goes against the neurons’ natural disposition to find symmetry in the visual cues. This feature forms the sole difference between the following pairs: b/d, p/q, M/W, n/u, b/p, d/q and, the main difference, between A/V, S/Z, a/e, s/z and f/j. In addition to the visual neurons’ difficulty in recognizing the small traits that distinguish one letter from another and in learning asymmetric information, two other major problems arise in learning the alphabetic principles: syllable and speech chain segmentation. These difficulties stem from the fact that, before having learned the alphabetic principles, people perceive the speech chain as a continuum, since there are no spaces separating the words from one another nor are there contrasts between the segments that make up the syllable, due to coarticulation. Since the conference on the Relationship between Speech and Learning to Read sponsored by the Growth and Development Branch of the Institute of Child Health and Human Development, held at Belmont, Md., USA, on May 16, 1971 [11], there has been agreement among the participants on what Jenkins and Liberman [12] stated as the starting point for the conference, namely the shocking contrast between the difficulties in perceiving the speech chain and reading. The first difficulty consists of the fact that, before knowing the principles of the alphabetic system, a child does not consciously perceive the contrasts between intrasyllabic segments and cannot segment them. This is absolutely necessary for understanding the principles of the alphabetic systems, since each grapheme represents a phoneme and not a syllable. When children enter school, they have already internalized the phonological system of their language, and although they have an unconscious phonemic knowledge for using language, they are unable to segment the syllable. This inability stems from the fact that the speech chains they process show neither pauses between words nor contrasts between segments: by virtue of coarticulation, an overlap occurs among acoustic cues of the adjacent segments. Since this processing is not conscious, it is inaccessible for the child’s inspection. Inspection becomes possible only if a kind of language is available for labeling the units and cutting them down, a process known as phonemic awareness. Consequently, an essenScliar-Cabral

tial differentiation has to be made between phonemic awareness and unconscious phonemic knowledge for using language by way of declarative memory. Every native speaker of any language has unconscious phonemic knowledge, spontaneously internalized during language acquisition, while phonemic awareness is available only to those who have learned an alphabetic system. All evidence demonstrates that such learning is not easy. I will stress these difficulties examining the differences between oral and written alphabetic system learning. Although they share some common architectonic properties, i.e. 3 levels, the first, combining meaningful units, the second, combining meaningless units, respectively phonemes and graphemes, and the third, combining distinctive features and letter features, there are marked differences in the way they are acquired. Alphabetic system learning takes place when the learner is already able to use metacognitive and metalinguistic strategies, since this learning demands conscious work. Children have to: (a) rearrange the way they perceive the speech chain; (b) realign their mental lexicon, since it was labeled the way they registered the item before they learned to read, for instance the word /gona/ (i.e. ‘gonna’) as it has been internalized in the mental lexicon must be redone as the written form ‘going to’, and (c) recycle the visual neurons, i.e., learn to recognize the feature direction that contrasts one letter to the other(s) and assign the phonological value each grapheme has (phonological awareness). The ability to separate a consonant from a coarticulated vowel develops only when a person becomes proficient in associating a grapheme to a phoneme. Neither persons who are illiterate nor persons who are semi-illiterate or even those who learned syllabic or morphemic systems [13, 14] are able to segment the syllable. The second difficulty deals with delimiting words, namely unstressed words. Before learning how to read, the child processes the speech chain as a continuum: there are no blanks separating words. The most challenging case is delimiting unstressed words, i.e. clitics, which carry additional problems, since they only represent grammatical meaning and are always affected by phonetic changes (for example, syllabic reanalysis, the phenomenon known as closed external juncture or external sandhi). Examples are /′ku.dn/, which relates to 2 words ‘could’ and ‘not’ in English, /u.zow.′vi.duS/ which relates also to 2 words ‘os’ (the) and ‘ouvidos’ (ears) in Portuguese, and /u.′nuo.mo/ which relates also to 2 words ‘un’ (a) ‘uomo’ (man) in Italian. This phenomenon blurs the frontiers between words, which probably Neuron Recycling

causes repercussions on the form of mental internalized lexical items. All these challenges which children face learning to read, and which are partly responsible for the significant amount of functional illiteracy, have motivated the author to seek solutions based on the latest findings of linguistics, psycholinguistics and neuroscience. Moreover, there is a wealth of scholarship on efforts to eradicate functional illiteracy, particularly the Early Intervention Initiative program [15], initially developed by the Scottish Executive Education Department in 1997 and implemented by the West Dunbartonshire Council [16]. The contributions of Vygotsky [17] and Montessori [18] were critical, the first in emphasizing the mediator’s role in learning as well as developing the theory of the proximal zone, and the second in applying the multisensory principle to enhance learning. Scliar’s Early Literacy Development System The system addresses the two main challenging problems of early literacy development, namely segmenting words and syllables (phonemic awareness) and recognizing letter features. It must be pointed out that the Portuguese written system (like the Spanish one) is transparent for reading: most of the grapheme-phoneme correspondences are predictable and a large number of them have their value independently of graphemic context. The learning-teaching material is comprised of the student’s book, Aventuras de Vivi (Vivi’s Adventures) [19] and two teacher’s books, Sistema Scliar de Alfabetização – Fundamentos (Scliar’s Early Literacy Development System – Fundamentals) [20] and Sistema Scliar de Alfabetização – Roteiros para o professor: 1o Ano (Scliar’s Early Literacy Development System – Scripts for Teachers: 1st Year) [21] together with the games of Heinig and Stolf [22] for the development of phonological awareness. The project involves teachers’ training through courses and continuing assistance. The system introduces completely new concepts and strategies into the educational Brazilian milieu: – that reading is a prerequisite of writing – there is no output without input; – that one of the greatest difficulties in this learning consists of segmenting the chain of speech into words, including clitics, to pair them with those separated by blanks in written texts; segmenting the syllable into units to pair their abstract representations, the phonemes, with the respective graphemes, i.e. developing phonemic awareness together with learning the principles of their alphabetic written language, and autoFolia Phoniatr Logop 2014;66:58–66 DOI: 10.1159/000363764

61

mation of the recognition of features that distinguish letters among them (visual neuron recycling). The teaching-learning strategies follow the steps: – start with two key words, VIVI (the name of the main character in the story) and OVO (egg) from which the 3 first graphemes to be taught are extracted (V, I, O); these were chosen by the following criteria: simplicity of the letter features (absence of mirroring effects), similarity between upper- and lowercase, consonant phonemic value independent of graphic context, the conversion of phoneme into sound can be pronounced separately, and the phoneme does not show contextdependent phonetic variants; – write the key words on the blackboard and ask the students to open the book to the appropriate page, which contains the words and grapheme on the left and the story on the right; pointing to the first letter, the teacher instructs the student to follow along the letter in the page with his/her finger. It is at this moment that children will learn the direction and position of the letter features, together with the phonemic value of the corresponding grapheme, since they are tracing with their finger the letter feature direction, while they are producing the corresponding phoneme sound; instructors are not permitted to name the letters; during the entire session they will point to the blackboard and produce the sound corresponding to the phoneme, represented by the grapheme in that word; – follow the same procedure with the second letter of the syllable, as the child accompanies with his/her finger the letter feature directions; – have the child read the whole word aloud while simultaneously tracing the feature directions, beginning with the first letter and continuing to the last one; – end by directing the child to read aloud the word written on the blackboard while tapping the syllabic rhythm with their hands – strongly for the more stressed syllable and weakly for the unstressed syllables. After having learned how to recognize the letter features of the 3 first graphemes (V, I, O), the children are ready to read all the words in bold in the first chapter of the story Adventures of Vivi displayed on the page to the right. The story is read aloud, along with the teacher. The teacher reads the words that are not in bold and the children read those that are in bold. The title of the first chapter is ‘Vivi’. Other activities are included in the plans for each unit, which are available in the book Scliar’s Early Literacy Development System – Scripts for Teachers: 1st Year. These 62

Folia Phoniatr Logop 2014;66:58–66 DOI: 10.1159/000363764

activities are: textual production, mathematics, music, dance, painting, theater, ecology and sports, and are intended to enhance learning and to provide the children an integral education. Method In order to test the validity of Scliar’s System of Early Literacy Development, 2 researchers have developed an experiment guided by Scliar-Cabral, during which first graders from two primary schools in Florianópolis, Brazil, were divided into two groups: an experimental group and a control group. The 2 researchers spent 3 h each week training the teacher and an additional 3 h in the classroom. The 16 subjects (10 girls and 6 boys) of the experimental group (mean age 6.02) were 1st grade students at a private primary school in Florianópolis (Ingleses neighborhood). During their presence in the classroom, the researchers identified that the 2 subjects who failed to become literate showed cognitive and behavioral problems that required more serious intervention. Most of the subjects’ families lived in the neighborhood and consisted largely of self-employed workers and service providers. Regarding the level of parental education, most of them had completed high school and a minority had some higher education. The teacher was trained in pedagogy with a specialization in early childhood education and initial elementary education and had served as a teacher for 4 years. It was the first time that she had taught 1st grade children, using Scliar’s Early Literacy Development System. The 16 subjects (7 girls and 9 boys) of the control group (mean age 6.10) were 1st grade students at a private primary school in another Florianópolis neighborhood (Santinho neighborhood). Most of the subjects’ families lived in the neighborhood and consisted largely of public employees and business executives. Regarding the level of education, most parents had higher education. The teacher was trained in pedagogy with a specialization in early childhood education and initial elementary education. She had been working with elementary grade students for 8 years, 4 of them with early literacy learning. She consistently adopted Emilia Ferreiro’s piagetian approach. There was no researchers’ intervention in the control group. The experimental and intervention research began in 2011. Before starting the experiment, the researchers obtained consent from the school chief officers and from the children’s parents. The second step was establishing the theoretical foundation for the experimental group teacher, as well as her training for intervention with children. The training was offered twice a week: on the first day, the weekly plan was discussed and activities organized together with learning materials, and theoretical questions were answered; on the second day, the two researchers worked directly in the classroom, observing teacher and students’ performance and intervening in the activities. The research instruments included a psychosociolinguistic questionnaire to develop a profile for each subject and the instruments of pedagogical intervention already mentioned and the assessment instrument. At the end of the experiment, the battery ‘Reception and production of verbal language’ [23] was applied to both groups to as-

Scliar-Cabral

sess the effects of the intervention, using Scliar’s Early Literacy Development System. The battery consisted of 9 tests, as follows: – the test of auditory reception, which aimed at detecting whether the subject perceives the phonetic features that distinguish word meanings in Brazilian Portuguese; the experimenter (E) sits behind the child and says a word, which the child has to match to 1 of 6 pictures; – the test of oral sentence comprehension, which aimed at evaluating the subject’s competence understanding either simpler sentences or more complex ones; E sits behind the child and says a sentence, which the child has to match to one of 4 pictures; – the test of word oral production, matching with pictures, which aimed at detecting the subjects’ control of articulating gestures of their sociolinguistic variety; E points to 1 of 6 pictures, and the child has to label it; – the test of sentence oral production, matching with pictures, which aimed at detecting the subject’s competence to plan and execute either simpler sentences or more complex ones; E points to 1 of 6 pictures, and the child has to produce a sentence; – grapheme-phoneme test: the subject has to read aloud a pseudoword with 4 graphemes, signaled by the experimenter and designed to assess the subject’s ability to convert a grapheme into its corresponding phoneme, following the principles of the Brazilian Portuguese alphabetic system and/or their ability to perceive written features that distinguish each letter from the others, in particular letters that mirror each other. The pseudoword was also designed to provide evidence whether the subject has been taught by global methods, and, if so, he/she guessed a word by accessing his/her mental lexicon (for instance, the pseudoword in English sid would be read as /sɪt/, instead of / sɪd/), or if, indeed, the subject has been taught by letter labeling, and, consequently he/she disobeyed the phonemic value of the grapheme, conditioned by the context, pronouncing the sounds that the letter name evokes (for instance, the pseudoword in English cud would be read as /sud/, instead of /kud/); – phoneme-grapheme test: the subject has to point to 1 of 5 specially designed words, after hearing an oral stimulus delivered by the experimenter, to verify in a controlled manner whether the learner has automated the coding rules of phonemes into graphemes; observe the first 5 words of the test, from which the subject must choose after hearing the oral stimulus /′pudo/: pudo, budo, qudo, lopa, pude; depending upon which item the subject points to, the experimenter can infer whether the subject is illiterate when he/she systematically points to the pseudoword whose graphemes do not represent the phonemes of the stimulus; for instance, in the list of 5 bold words, when the experimenter says /′pudo/, he/she points to lopa, which would indicate an absence of the coding rules; one can also verify if the subject is unable to convert phonemes into graphemes, when, listening to an unfamiliar word, he/she is only able to write memorized words, pointing systematically to words that are already in his/her mental lexicon [for instance, the experimenter says the pseudoword in English /sɪd/ and the subject signals the word sit; in the list of 5 bold words, when the experimenter says /′pudo/, he/she points to pude (I could, in English)]; the experimenter could also check whether the subject has automated the conversion rules of phonemes into graphemes, conditioned by the phonemic context or whether the

subject has been taught by letter labeling and, consequently, disobeys the rules of converting phonemes into graphemes, conditioned by the phonemic context (for instance, instead of pointing to the English pseudoword cuf when the experimenter says /kuf/, he/she points to quf); he can also verify whether the subject continues mirroring (in the list of 5 bold words, when the experimenter says /′pudo/, the subject points to qudo); – reading aloud a story: this test allows the experimenter to check whether the subject has or has not automated the rules for grapheme-phoneme correspondence, presenting fluent reading with appropriate intonation patterns and whether he/she shows no pauses or hesitations, or, on the contrary, whether he/ she shows pauses or hesitations detecting disfluency; the reading passage was an unknown fictional narrative, containing a setting, 3 characters and 3 episodes, one of them with dialogue; – reading comprehension test: the story is read silently, then there are correct and incorrect inferences from the story material, among which the child has to mark the correct ones.

Neuron Recycling

Folia Phoniatr Logop 2014;66:58–66 DOI: 10.1159/000363764

Results

The results of the application of the oral, auditory reception, oral sentence comprehension, oral word production and sentence oral production test demonstrated that there was no significant difference between the experimental group and the control group. However, taking into consideration the number of tests applied and for the sake of brevity, only the detailed results for one of the tests are presented in this paper – the test of grapheme-phoneme correspondence. It is, however, worth noting that, among the 16 subjects in the experimental group, 12 became literate after 7 months of exposure to Scliar’s Early Literacy Development System and only 4 did not, for reasons to be explained later. At the end of the experiment, the 12 subjects who did attain literacy were able to fluently read a story presented to them for the first time; their performance was filmed and recorded. The readings were phonetically transcribed and then analyzed according to categories to detect lack of fluency. Only 1 of the subjects in the control group managed to read with fluency. Of the 4 subjects in the experimental group who did not develop early literacy, the first, 2 months after the start of the school year, moved with his family to Uruguay and only returned in October, having not been instructed with Scliar’s Early Literacy Development System. The second subject started attending school only in April (observe that Brazilian elementary school starts in February), when the other students were already well advanced in the System. In addition, the child’s family, unlike other students’ families, never attended the school meetings, 63

Color version available online

Correct answers

40 35 30 25 20 15 10 5 0 0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 Subjects

Fig. 1. Total number of correct answers, given to 38 questions, re-

flecting grapheme-phoneme correspondences for 2 independent groups of subjects. The triangles show the results for the experimental group that used the Scliar Early Literacy Development System, and the squares show those of the control group that used Emilia Ferreiro’s piagetian approach. Within each group, the points are ordered from the lowest to highest scores along the xaxis.

and it was established that there was no learning reinforcement at home. The other 2 subjects who failed to become literate showed cognitive and behavioral problems that required more serious intervention, as mentioned previously. An inclusion policy in Brazil results in such children receiving equal attention from the teacher, but he/she is not able to give them the special treatment. Data for the grapheme-phoneme test are shown in figure 1, with the following hypotheses: H0: the grapheme-phoneme test average values of the two groups are statistically identical and the differences between them are determined randomly; H1: the grapheme-phoneme average values of the group that used Scliar’s Early Literacy Development System are statistically greater than the average values for the group that did not use the system. Using the confidence level of 5% (α = 0.05), with degree of freedom (d.f.) 30, we obtained a p value of 0.01 as a result of a t test (independent samples, 2-tailed test, equal variances). This value is below the limit for acceptance of the null hypothesis, that is p > α = 5%. Thus, there is no more than 1% chance that the differences between the averages of data from the two classes are randomly determined. The effect size was large, with a Cohen’s d value of 0.97. The test results indicate that the application of Scliar’s Early Literacy Development System influenced the experimental group performance. 64

Folia Phoniatr Logop 2014;66:58–66 DOI: 10.1159/000363764

As can be seen from figure 1, only 1 subject belonging to the experimental group got all the answers correct, and 2 belonging to the experimental group and the control group got almost all the answers, but the performance of the other 8 subjects in the experimental group was better than that of the following 3 subjects in the range, and the following 2 subjects in the experimental group performed better than the next 10 subjects in the control group. The 4 subjects belonging to the experimental group who fared the worst have already been discussed in this paper as having shown problems in their exposure to the intervention or displaying cognitive and behavioral problems.

Discussion

According to the classification of Paulo Montenegro’s Institute [24], there are 4 levels of functional literacy: level 1, illiterate, the inability to perform simple tasks involving decoding of words and phrases; level 2, rudimentary level, the ability to read titles or phrases with explicit information; level 3, basic level, the ability to read a short text with explicit information or requiring a low inference processing, and level 4, full level, the ability to read longer texts, to find and to relate more information, comparing several texts and identifying sources. The numbers of functionally illiterate individuals in Brazil are alarming: 6% of illiterate persons are found in the age group of 15– 64 years, 21% at the rudimentary level, 47% at the basic level and only 26% achieve the full level. This means that only 26% of Brazilians can be considered to be included in the contemporary society – the information society. Additionally the PISA report [25] from 2011 states the very low performance of Brazilian students in the 15-yearold age group in language, mathematics and science. All these data led us to question the educational policy in Brazil for early literacy development – the level that decides future students’ reading and writing competence. We sought, therefore, to investigate what programs had achieved the best results in preventing functional illiteracy, and the advances made by science to better understand the processes involved in reading and learning. As a consequence, we designed Scliar’s Early Literacy Development System aimed at forming and training of personnel involved with literacy, as well as the preparation of teaching materials for children. As it turned out, the design is based on a new approach to the development of phonological awareness, expanding it with developing the ability to delimit words, including clitics, as well as assigning stress in the words. It is particularly important Scliar-Cabral

to distinguish between phonemic awareness and sound discrimination. The Scliar training program was inspired by work of Dehaene and colleagues [9], who have reported functional MRI data proving that emphasis is focused on vision neuronal recycling for automating the recognition of the direction and articulation of features that distinguish letters. Another contribution was drawn from Montessori’s [18] concept on multisensory learning, in which the more senses are triggered, the better the learning. So, extending Montessori, vision, hearing, touch, proprioception and kinesthetic senses are driven to help the child recognize the direction of letter features and the graphemes associated with phonemes. However, this system needed to be validated, which occurred during the 2011 experiment reported in this article. The data discussion refers only to the graphemephoneme test which demonstrated the positive effect of Scliar’s Early Literacy Development System on the experimental group, compared to the control group. For this part of the test, the subject has to read aloud a pseudoword with 4 graphemes, signaled by the experimenter and designed to assess the subject’s ability to convert a grapheme into its corresponding phoneme, following the principles of the Brazilian Portuguese alphabetic system and/ or his/her ability to perceive written features that distinguish each letter from the others and, in particular, mirroring. The test results indicate that the application of

Scliar’s Early Literacy Development System influenced the experimental group performance, since the effect size was large, with a Cohen’s d value of 0.97. The 4 subjects belonging to the experimental group who fared worse have already been discussed as displaying problems in their exposure to the intervention or having cognitive and behavioral problems. These results are similar to those obtained in the test of reading aloud, although the data were not presented in the current paper. In this test, categories were computed as number of full and empty pauses, repetitions, guessing, rupture of closed external sandhi, and mistakes. It was also checked whether the reader had monotone or expressive reading. The experimental results validate Scliar’s Early Literacy Development System and indicate the need to redesign early literacy development methods, supporting teachers involved in it and developing suitable teaching material for the student.

Acknowledgment Two researchers, Miriam Maia de Araújo Pereira and Lidiomar José Mascarello, developed the experiment, guided by Scliar-Cabral, during the year of 2011. The paper greatly benefited from the careful reading by Joshua K. Braden and Samantha Grimm Cabral.

References 1 Dehaene S: Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention. New York, Viking/Penguin Group, 2009, p 147. 2 Tamura H, Tanaka K: Visual response properties of cells in the ventral and dorsal parts of the macaque inferotemporal cortex. Cereb Cortex 2001;11:384–399. 3 Verhaeghe A, Kolinsky R: Discriminação entre figuras orientadas em espelho em função do modo de apresentação em adultos escolarizados e adultos iletrados; in Barahona da Fonseca I, Barahona de Fonseca J, Mendes CB (eds): Jornadas de estudo dos processos cognitivos (Lisboa, 1991). Lisboa, Faculdade de Psicologia e de Ciências de Educação, Univ. de Lisboa, 1992, pp 51–67. 4 Education Guardian: Sounds incredible. The Guardian, Tuesday, July 10, 2007 (accessed October 24, 2007). 5 Cornell JM: Spontaneous mirror-writing in children. Can J Psychol 1985;39:174–179. 6 Monzalvo K, Fluss J, Billard C, Dehaene S, Dehaene-Lambertz G: Cortical networks for vision and language in dyslexic and normal children of variable socio-economic status. Neuroimage 2012;61:258–274.

Neuron Recycling

7 Dehaene S, Pegado F, Braga LW, Ventura P, Filho GN, Jobert A, Dehaene-Lambertz G, Kolinsky R, Morais J, Cohen L: How learning to read changes the cortical networks for vision and language. Science 2010;330:1359–1364. 8 Polk TA, Farah MJ: Functional MRI evidence for an abstract, not perceptual word-form area. J Exp Psychol Gen 2002;131:65–72. 9 Qiao E, Vinckier F, Szwed M, Naccache L, Valabregue R, Dehaene S, Cohen L: Unconsciously deciphering handwriting: subliminal invariance for handwritten words in the visual word form area. Neuroimage 2010; 49: 1787. 10 Scliar L: Neuroscience applied to learning alphabetic principles: new proposals. Ilha Desterro 2012;63:187–211. 11 Kavanagh IJ, Mattingly IG (eds): Language by Ear and by Eye. The Relationships between Speech and Reading. Cambridge, MIT Press, 1972, pp 1–2. 12 Jenkins JJ, Liberman AM: Background to the conference; in Kavanaugh JF, Mattingly IG (eds): Language by Ear and by Eye. The Relationships between Speech and Reading. Cambridge, MIT Press, 1972, pp 1–2.

13 Morais J: Flows of information in and between systems of lexical access; in Scliar-Cabral L (ed): Psycholinguistics – Scientific and Technological Challenges. Porto Alegre, EDIPUCRS, 2010, pp 62–83. 14 Read C, Zhang YF, Nie HY, Ding BQ: The ability to manipulate speech sounds on knowing alphabetic reading. Cognition 1986; 24: 31–34. 15 Gilbert C: Commentary by Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector. The Annual Report of Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector 2006/07. Ofsted, 2007 (accessed October 29, 2007). 16 West Dunbartonshire Council: Literacy initiative wins major award. News Room. 29/07/2007. http://www.wdcweb.info/news/ displayarticle.asp?id=12752 (accessed October 24, 2007). 17 Vygotsky LS: A formação social da mente. São Paulo, Martins Fontes, 1991. 18 Montessori M: Basic Ideas of Montessori’s Educational Theory: Extracts from Maria Montessori’s Writings and Teachings. Comp Paul Oswald (transl Lawrence Salmon). Oxford, Clio Press, 1997.

Folia Phoniatr Logop 2014;66:58–66 DOI: 10.1159/000363764

65

19 Scliar-Cabral L: Aventuras de Vivi. Florianópolis, Lili, 2012. 20 Scliar-Cabral L: Sistema Scliar de Alfabetização – Fundamentos. Florianópolis, Lili, 2013. 21 Scliar-Cabral L: Sistema Scliar de Alfabetização – Roteiros para o professor: 1o Ano. Florianópolis, Lili, 2014. 22 Oliveira Martins Heinig OL, Stolf J: Jogos para o desenvolvimento da consciência fonológica. Blumenau, Authors’ publishing, 2010.

66

23 Scliar-Cabral L: Bateria de Recepção e Produção da Linguagem Verbal (Battery of Reception and Production of Verbal Language); in Scliar-Cabral L (ed): Guia prático de alfabetização, baseado em princípios do sistema alfabético do português do Brasil. São Paulo, Contexto, 2003, pp 119–250.

Folia Phoniatr Logop 2014;66:58–66 DOI: 10.1159/000363764

24 INAF: Inaf 2011–2012, Instituto Paulo Montenegro e Ação Educativa mostram evolução do alfabetismo funcional na última década. Boletim INAF, 2012. http://www.ipm.org.br/ index.php?mpg=undefined&ver=por (accessed December14, 2012). 25 OCDE: OCDE in figures. http//ocde.p4siteinternet.com/publications/doifiles/ 012005061T032.xls (accessed June 6, 2011).

Scliar-Cabral

Copyright: S. Karger AG, Basel 2014. Reproduced with the permission of S. Karger AG, Basel. Further reproduction or distribution (electronic or otherwise) is prohibited without permission from the copyright holder.