CASTELO, Adelina    SOUSA, Otília. Spelling performance among students of higher education: graphic accentuation. []. , 7, 3, pp.84-107. ISSN 2182-1372.

Despite the impact that spelling performance has on the reading, writing and social valuation of the writer, there is no data on the mastering of this competence among students of higher education, who use European Portuguese (EP) as their mother tongue. Therefore, this exploratory study aims to (i) identify the prevalence level of accentuation errors among adult spellers of EP; (ii) characterize these errors; (iii) discuss their possible causes. The data analyzed were taken from a corpus of 119 texts written in the context of the entrance exam in professional masters by users of EP as their mother tongue. The results show that (i) accentuation is a frequent problem, even in highly schooled subjects and in an evaluation context; (ii) most frequent errors maintain the segmental quality of the stressed vowel, in proparoxytone or false proparoxytone words, involving the vowels [i] or [a], and / or are due to the omission of accent; (iii) the motivation of the errors seems to combine phonetic-phonological factors, the lack of knowledge on the functioning of the orthographic system and an excessive recourse to the words’ visual form. Some didactic implications are drawn from these conclusions.

: Stress; orthography; higher education students; European Portuguese.

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