Dyslexia, morphological awareness, and syntactic awareness: a linguistic analysis of texts written by young people and adults
Dyslexia; Portuguese; writing; morphological awareness; syntactic awareness.
The research “Dyslexia, morphological awareness, and syntactic awareness: a linguistic analysis of texts written by young people and adults” aims to investigate whether the morphological awareness and/or syntactic awareness (or morphosyntactic awareness) of individuals with dyslexia would also be affected due to the existence of this learning disorder, as it occurs with phonological awareness. Among the objectives, we seek not only to demonstrate the relevance of the dyslexia debate in the educational context but also to critically review the tests on morphological awareness and syntactic awareness available in the literature from a linguistic perspective. We also intend to propose a protocol for investigating morphological and syntactic awareness for the analysis of texts produced by young adults with dyslexia. Regarding studies on dyslexia in the Portuguese language, we have utilized the works of Cuba dos Santos (1987), Ellis (1995), Martins (2003), Ianhez & Nico (2003), Davis & Braun (2004), Lukasova et al. (2009), ABD (2015), and Moura (2017). These studies point out dyslexic manifestations such as phoneme and grapheme substitutions, alterations in the order of letters or syllables, omissions and additions of letters, word substitutions with similar ones, inappropriate agglutinations and fragmentations of words, difficulties in reading unfamiliar words or non-words, confusion between symmetrical letters, and syllable order inversion in words—characteristics that are typically phonological. Our methodological approach is based on qualitative research, quantitative research, and triangulation (FLICK, 2009; FONSECA, 2002; MAXWELL, 1996). Our corpus consists of 256 written productions by individuals with dyslexia in the Programa de Avaliação Seriada (PAS/UnB) and in the Vestibular of the University of Brasília between 2010 and 2016. We analyzed the dyslexic characteristics of these productions based on the specific literature on the topic and the assumptions of Usage-based Functional Linguistics (MARTELOTTA, 2011; BYBEE, 2016). As a result of this thesis, we have developed an applied and applicable proposal for the analysis of texts produced by young adults with dyslexia. We have identified in the analyzed texts typical dyslexic traits already pointed out in the literature related to phonological awareness, and especially, we have also identified traits related to morphological and syntactic awareness of individuals with dyslexia, which deserve to be investigated in future research.