PURPOSE: to investigate monolingual and bilingual girls and boys performance, in the skills of phonological awareness. METHODS: questionnaire and hearing screening to select the sample, consisting of 89 students, aged 4:1 to 8:11-years old, 47 girls and 42 boys, of which 47 subjects were bilingual (Portuguese and German) and 42 monolingual (Portuguese). The selected sample was submitted to the assessment of skills in phonological awareness, applying the Phonological Awareness Protocol (Cielo, 2001) that suggests segmentation of sentences in words, nominal realism, rhyme detection, syllabic synthesis and segmentation, syllable detection, syllabic and phonemic reversion, phonemic exclusion, phoneme detection and phonemic synthesis and segmentation. For a quantitative data analysis, a statistical test of Kruskal-Wallis with p = 0.05 was taken when comparing the monolingual boys' and girls' performance, and the bilingual boys' and girls' performance by task of phonological awareness. RESULTS: when the bilingual subjects were analyzed, there was a statistical significance in the detection of rhyme with trisyllable (p=0,0087) and synthesis of four phonemes (p=0,0219), with advantage of girls, while in the analysis that compared monolingual boys and girls, the results were more balanced. CONCLUSIONS: despite of almost lacking statistically significant results in the comparison among bilingual and monolingual boys and girls, female superiority was observed in most of phonological awareness tasks.
Language; Language Arts; Multilingualism; Awareness; Child
