Syntactic Awareness and Text Production in Brazilian Portuguese Students with Learning Disabilities.

AIMS: This study compared the syntactic awareness and textual production skills of school children and teenagers with and without learning disabilities (LD) and related their performances in both skills.

METHODS: The study group consisted of 15 children with an LD and 15 without language and learning alterations. To compare the performance of both groups, data were statistically analyzed using Fisher's exact test, and the association between the evidence in each group was demonstrated by Spearman's correlations, with a significance level of 5% (p < 0.05).

RESULTS: Most subjects with LD showed a lower performance in tests of syntactic awareness and textual production. Statistical analysis indicated a significant difference in the performance of children with and without language disorders for both tested skills. A positive relationship was found between the children's performance in the test of textual production and the tasks of syntactic awareness.

CONCLUSION: Our findings suggest that the ability to judge and correct grammatical structures can be an important factor in the development of the skills used to produce a text.