he present work originates from the dissertation project presented to the Postgraduate Program
in Letters and Linguistics at the Universidade Federal do Tocantins – UFT – Campus at Porto
Nacional. The central theme of the work is on how the delay in language acquisition can affect
the formation of scientific concepts and, therefore, influence academic performance. The Deaf
community faces a situation of deprivation of the language, since the dominant language in the
country is oral-auditory, which differs from the visuospatial language acquired naturally by
Deaf people. As a result of this situation, generally Deaf people who do not have the privilege
of being born in environments where sign language is shared are years deprived of a language
which they should naturally acquire, which makes their language acquisition process late
compared to linguistically non-private people. Discussions about the Critical Period Hypothesis
(CPH) for language acquisition are limited to using as cases of socially isolated people, speakers
of a second language who cannot lose their accent, as well as neurolinguistic analyzes of people
with aphasias. These studies are related to the issue of linguistic execution and not necessarily
to cognitive issues. As a result, the results on a critical language acquisition period are still
inconsistent. In this sense, the linguistic reality of the Deaf Community can contribute to
discussions about CPH. Thus, based on the central theme, the following research question is
formulated: can the delay in language acquisition generate losses in the development of abstract
scientific concepts? The main theoretical sources used for this research are: Vygotsky (2008),
Goldfeld (2002), Santana (2007) and Quadros & Finger (2017). The first two authors
mentioned consider that communication plays a crucial role in our development, because it is
through it that we assimilate information; then, language plays an essential role in the
constitution of our thoughts. Thus, research increasingly points to an intrinsic relationship
between thought and language. The general objective of this research is, therefore, to analyze
if there is a relation between linguistic competence, language acquisition period and academic
performance. For this, two aspects will be verified: linguistic and academic performance. In the
first aspect, two linguistic assessment protocols will be applied: one that assesses the Portuguese
language in written form and another that assesses performance in Libras. Academic
performance will be measured based on interviews with teachers. The application of data
collection aims to verify whether there is a relationship between academic and linguistic
performance. The subjects of the research were Deaf students and teachers of the Letters: Libras
course at UFT. The results of the data analysis show that the greater the delay in language
acquisition, the lower the score in linguistic assessments (both in Libras and in Portuguese) and, concomitantly, the lower the academic performance. There is evidence, therefore, that the delay
in language acquisition has negative implications for academic performance, which
demonstrates a close link between thought and language.
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