PURPOSE: To elaborate specific tests to evaluate the processing of abilities necessary to the acquisition of the alphabetic writing system of Brazilian Portuguese, and to characterize and compare the performance of elementary school students from 1st to 4th grades on the proposed test. METHODS: Specific tests were elaborated following the phonological principles of Brazilian Portuguese. One hundred and twenty students from 1st to 4th grade of a public elementary school were divided into four groups of 30 subjects: GI, GII, GIII and GIV. The tests were: tests of metalinguistic abilities (syllable and phoneme identification and manipulation, and nonwords repetition); reading tests (reading of real words and pseudowords). RESULTS: There were statistically significant differences among the groups for metalinguistic abilities, with averages decreasing successively from 1st to 4th grade. Differences were also found for time of real words and of pseudowords reading, with averages decreasing from 1st to 3rd grade, and remaining equal or close between 3rd and 4th grades. CONCLUSION: The performances were gradually increasing from 1st to 4th grade, and the students obtained superior performances on the identification tasks, when compared to manipulation tasks, as well as the performances on the syllabic tasks were superior to the phonemic tasks. There was a prevalence of the phonological route in the initial grades (1st and 2nd), while 4th graders preferred the lexical route.
Reading; Evaluation; Learning; Linguistic; Students
