PURPOSE: to check possible differences among pre-school boys and girls in literacy process, regarding their performance in Phonological Awareness (PA) tasks. METHOD: 75 boys and 88 girls, aged between 5:6 and 8:0, submitted to an assessment involving a form sent to the parents, a complete speech and language screening, the assessment of the intellectual and writing levels and the abilities in phonological awareness (PA). For a statistical data analysis we applied the Two-Way ANOVA, Tukey and T-Student tests. RESULTS: girls showed a positive significance in the tasks: syllabic segmentation with four syllable words (p=0.03); syllabic detection in the initial position (p=0.05), final position (p=0.01) and intermediary position (p=0.04). In the percentage analysis of the average in correct answers per task, boys' performance was only higher in tasks of sentence segmentation in words, with two (average=7.52), three (average=5.79), four (average=4.56), five (average=3.93) and six words (average=3.56) and in the nominal realism (average=8.93). CONCLUSION: we found a significant superior performance of the girls in the tasks of syllabic detection and syllabic segmentation with four-syllable words. In a qualitative analysis, girls obtained higher averages in all tasks of awareness and rhymes, syllables and phonemes.
Language; Language Arts; Conscience; Female; Male