Transferência de funções ordinais através de classes de estímulos equivalentes em surdos

Abstract

The bilingual approach, adopted for educating deaf people in Brazil, regards the Brazilian Sign Language (Libras) as the first language and the written Portuguese Language as the instrumental language. The acquisition of the written language may be more difficult than the acquisition of the sign language due to the differences between their ordinal grammatical structures. The ordinal grammatical structure of the written Portuguese consists in a subject verb preposition complement order, whereas the structure of the Sign Language allows not only this order, but also different combinations of the elements. Such differences usually result, for the deaf people, in a writing repertoire of the Portuguese Language that has a different grammatical order than that one used by the verbal community in which they are inserted. This study investigated variables that control the transfer of ordinal functions through classes of equivalent stimuli. The experimental stimuli used were 32 printed words divided into four stimuli categories (A1A2A3A4; B1B2B3B4; C1C2C3C4 e D1D2D3D4), corresponding to subject, verb, preposition/article and complement, respectively. The categories were taught through matching-to-sample (MTS) tasks, while the sequences were taught through constructed-response matching-to-sample (CRMTS). All participants showed the formation of four stimulus classes, and learned one sequence (A1A2A3A4). After that, they showed the transference of ordinal functions to untaught sequences. In summary, results showed the transference of ordinal functions through equivalence classes.