Percurso de construção da fonologia pela criança: uma abordagem dinâmica

Abstract

This dissertation aims to describe the children phonological development, focus on the acquisition of alveopalatal affricate the sounds [t_] and [d_], in Brazilian Portuguese. The affricates acquisition leads to reflection on the emergent phonological relationship and the categories construction, as they are allophones of the [t] and [d] phonemes. The research is based on the following theories: Whole-Word Phonology, Usagebased Phonology, Exemplar Model and Dynamic Model, which point that the acquisition occurs in a non-linear and dynamic fashion and the word plays an important role, as a fundamental unit of analysis and representation.The corpus is composed of data from three male and one female child. The subjects were audio- and video-recorded monthly for one year, with 30 minutes mother-child spontaneous interaction. The data analysis is divided in two parts. The first one describes the production of child first words. It aims to describe the templates emergence and to establish a child phonological development profile. The second one focuses specifically on alveopalatal affricates acquisition. The data is predominantly qualitative. However, supplementary quantitative analyses were also carried out.The results point out that the phonological acquisition is highly variable and individual. The lexical item plays an important role in many developmental points. This fact reinforces the Usage-Based Phonology and Exemplar Models claim that acquisition is guided by the lexicon, as each different individual show different strategies, to produce a target sound, in relation to a specific lexical item. Furthermore, it was observed that longitudinal study, as proposed by Dynamic Model, is essential to comprehend the phonological acquisition. Using longitudinal study it is possible to describe regression and non-linearity, which reflect the child phonological organization and hypothesis about the language phonological system.