Evocação de Termos Mentais por Pré-Escolares: Um Estudo com Narrativa por Imagem

This study investigated pre-school children’s evocation of mental terms. The children were enrolled on a private school of one of Minas Gerais city. Children had to read a narrative by image storybook. Seventeen 5-year-old children and seventeen 6-year-olds were selected by a convenience criterion. Children read the books individually. The reports were recorded, transcribed and encoded using the following taxonomy: cognitive, emotional terms, wish / intention and perceptive. The results showed that the 5-year-old children evoked more mental terms (362) than the 6 year-olds ones (289). The eldest children evoked more sophisticated terms, suggesting that they have a tendency to express mental language more often than the 5-year-olds children. The emphasis in the perceptive terms shows that the two groups focused the physical actions of the characters, questioning the structure of the used books and highlighting the need for new inquiries to be answered using other books that contain differentiated structures