PURPOSE: characterizing and comparing the performance of students with and without learning difficulties from the private education in phonological awareness, rapid naming, reading and writing. METHODS: sixty private students from 2nd to 4th grade participated, distributed into 6 groups - each one was composed of 10 students being 3 groups of students with learning difficulties and 3 groups without such difficulties. As procedure was used the phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming and oral reading and writing under dictation. RESULTS: the results highlighted a superior development of those who without learning difficulties compared to the students with learning difficulties. CONCLUSION: the students with learning difficulties presented a higher score in the time/speed task of rapid naming and, consequently, lower production in activities of phonological awareness and reading and writing, when compared to students without difficulties. Thus, a relation engagement between rapid naming and lexical access is revealed, as well as between visual discrimination, frequency of word occurrence and presentation of the code naming needed to do the phoneme-grapheme conversion process required in the reading and writing in an alphabetic writing system such as the Portuguese language.
Reading; Learning Disorders; Education
