Selection strategy for homorganic forms in the acquisition of place in Brazilian Portuguese
Keywords:
phonological acquisition, homorganicity, repair and selection strategy, consonant harmonyAbstract
This study analyses how active selection strategy is in the phonological development of three children acquiring Brazilian Portuguese (BP) from 1;4 to 2;4 (year;month). Our analysis focus on the acquisition of labial, coronal and dorsal consonants in order to investigate how the order of acquisition of place of articulation can affect the lexicon selection for homorganic forms of their productions. The results show that word targets with homorganic consonant segments correspond for up to 34% of their productions during the 1-year period. More specifically, we have observed that up to 1;10 the homorganic forms add up to 49%, decreasing to 32% in the age period from 1;11 to 2;4. The results also show that homorganic coronals correspond for up to two-thirds of their productions (57%), followed by labials (30%) and dorsals (13%). We have seen, thus, that the lexical selection is an active strategy in the acquisition of place in BP.
Downloads
References
BARRETT, M. D. et al. Early lexical development and maternal speech: a comparison of children’s initial and subsequent uses of words. Journal of Child Language, n. 18, p. 21-40, 1991.
CALABRESE, A. A constraint-based theory of phonological markedness and simplification procedures. Linguistic Inquiry, v. 26, n. 3, p. 373-463, 1995.
CHOMSKY, N. Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1965.
FERGURSON, C. A.; FARWELL, C. B. Words and sounds in early language acquisition. Language, n. 51, p. 419-39, 1975.
FREITAS, M. J. Aquisição da estrutura silábica no Português Europeu. 1997. Tese (Doutorado em Linguística) – Universidade de Lisboa, Lisboa, Portugual. 1997.
FIKKERT, P.; LEVELT, C. How does place fall into place? The lexicon and emergent constraints in the developing phonological grammar. In: AVERY, P.; DRESHER, B. E.;
RICE, K. (Ed.) Contrast in phonology: perception and acquisition. Berlin: Mouton, 2008.
FOULKES, P.; DOCHERTY, G.; WATT, D. Phonological Variation in Child-Directed Speech. Language, v. 81, n. 1, p. 177-206, 2005.
GORMLEY, A. The production of consonant harmony in child speech. 2003. Dissertação (Mestrado em Linguística) – University of British Columbia, Vancouver. 2003.
HUME, E. Markedness. In: M. Van Oostendorp et al. Companion to Phonology. London: Blackwell, 2008.
JAKOBSON, R. Child language, aphasia, and phonological universals. Tradução de Allan Keiler. The Hague: Mouton, 1980 [1968].
KAGER, R. Optimality theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
KUHL, P. et al. Cross-language analysis of phonetic units in language addressed to infants. Science, p. 684-686, Aug 1, 1997.
LAMPRECHT, R. et al. Aquisição fonológica do Português: perfil de desenvolvimento e subsídios para terapia. Porto Alegre: Artes Médicas, 2003.
LIEVEN, E. Input and first language acquisition: evaluating the role of frequency. Lingua, n. 120, p. 2546-2556, 2010.
McCARTHY, J.; PRINCE, A. Prosodic Morphology. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Center for Cognitive Science, 1993.
MATYCHUK, P. The role of child-directed speech in language acquisition: a case study. Language Sciences, n. 27, p. 301-379, 2005.
MATZENAUER, C. L. B. Segmentos consonantais na aquisição da fonologia e em tipologias de línguas. Letras, UFSM, Santa Maria, v. 36, p. 57-84, 2008.
MOTA, H.B. Aquisição Segmental do Português: um Modelo Implicacional de Complexidade de Traços. 1996. Tese (Doutorado em Linguística Aplicada) – PUC-RS, Porto Alegre, 1996.
PARADIS, C.; PRUNET, J. The special status of coronals: internal and external evidence. Phonology, v. 9, n. 2, 363-370, 1992.
PRINCE, A. S.; SMOLENSKY, P. Optimality theory. Constraint interaction in Generative grammar. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Center for Cognitive Science, 1993.
RICE, K. Markedness in Phonology. In: DE LACY, P. (Org.) The Cambridge Handbook of Phonology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
SCHWARTZ, R.G.; LEONARD, L.B. Do children pick and choose? An examination of phonological selection and avoidance in early lexical acquisition. Journal of Child Language, v. 9, n. 2, p. 319-36, 1982.
SNOW, C. Issues in the study of input: finetuning, universality, individual and developmental differences, and necessary causes. In: FLETCHER, P.; MACWHINNEY, B. (Org.) The handbook of child language. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995. p. 180-193.
STOEL-GAMMON, C.; COOPER, J.A. Patterns of early lexical and phonological development. Journal of Child Language, v. 11, n. 2, 247-271, 1984.
STORKEL, H. L. Do children still pick and choose? The relationship between phonological knowledge and lexical acquisition beyond 50-words. Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, v. 20, p. 523-529, 2006.
THIESSEN, E.; HILL, E.; SAFFRAN, J. Infant-directed speech facilitates word segmentation. Infancy, v. 7, n. 1, p. 53-71, 2005.
VALLABHA, G. et al. Unsupervised learning of vowel categories from infant-directed speech. PNAS, v. 104, n. 33, p. 13273-13278, 2007.
VIARO, M. E.; GUIMARÃES FILHO, Z. O. Análise quantitativa da freqüência dos fonemas e estruturas silábicas portuguesas. Estudos Lingüísticos, São Paulo, v. 36, p. 28-36, 2007.
YAMAGUCHI, N. Markedness, frequency: can we predict the order of acquisition of contrasts? Proceedings of the 2nd Oxford Postgraduate Conference in Linguistics, Oxford University, 2008, p. 236-243.
