| dc.description.abstract | The present thesis investigates the relationship between phonological processing and numerical cognition. At first, we reviewed the literature regarding the impact of the subcomponents of phonological processing (phonological working memory, lexical access and phonological awareness in aspects of mathematics, such as arithmetic word problems, arithmetical facts and numerical transcoding. It was observed the lack of studies that control, simulatenously, the influence of phonological processing and other relevant cognitive mechanisms, like working memory and number sense. Based on this, we performed an empirical study, with children from 2nd to 4th grade that differed regarding their performance on a phoneme elision task, a measure of phonemic awareness. Children with performance below the 25th percentile were classified as low phonemic awareness (LPA) and the ones with performance above the 25th percentile, as typical phonemic awareness (TPA). The LPA group was inferior on simple calculation, mathematical word problems and numerical transcoding, even after controlling for the influence of working memory and number sense. In the number writing task, phoneme elision was the best neuropsychological predictor of the arcsine of errors and there was an interaction between the complexity of the items from the transcoding task and the phoneme elision groups. It can be concluded that phonemic awareness is related to symbolic aspects of mathematics, specially to verbal-Arabic numerical transcoding. | |
