THE INFLUENCE OF WORD FREQUENCY ON GRAPHONEMIC CONVERSION TIME

This research is part of a set of studies about reading processing in the initial grades of formal education. The theme is justified by the urgent need to qualify literacy practices in Brazilian education. Particularly, we sought to answer the following question: is it possible to observe the effect of word frequency in the oral reading of students in the initial classes of fundamental education, considering time and accuracy of graphophonemic conversion? For this, the objective was to investigate, both in isolated words and in the text, the effect of the frequency of words and pseudowords on performance in oral reading, specifically in the graphophonemic conversion time variable. The study evaluated these variables in the reading of 51 participants, between seven and nine years old, 17 students per class — 2nd, 3rd and 4th years — from a public school. Data were collected in three moments: in the first moment, the participants read isolated words; in the second moment, they read the text and, in the third, the students answered the instrument to survey the frequency of words. The audios of the first two moments were recorded. Data were tabulated, treated statistically and detailed in light of the simple psycholinguistic model of Double-Route. The results as a whole showed that, in general, high frequency words were read faster than the other categories (medium and low frequency and pseudoword), and that words in the text were converted faster than isolated words. Among other aspects, these results suggest that the use of frequent words in a teaching situation in the early years can positively influence the development of reading skills, as this strategy contributes to the transition from the phonological to the lexical route.