O tratamento do onset complexo iniciado por /s/ na aquisição do inglês como LE: um estudo de caso

Abstract

The aim of this research was to investigate the acquisition of syllable structure of English as a foreign language (FL), focusing specifically on the English initial /s/ clusters. This research is a case study and the data analyzed was from the linguistic production of a child who was acquiring English as foreign language and Portuguese as mother tongue. The corpora were collected when the subject was 3:5 and 13:4 (years:months). The data was submitted to acoustic analysis and also analyzed by means of a phonological approach, beneath the assumptions of the Syllable Theory (SELKIRK, 1982) and the Sonority Cycle (CLEMENTS, 1990). It could be verified that not only were the complex onsets acquired very early by the subject child, comparing to children who are native English speakers, but also initial /s/ cluster simplification strategies were applied. The results reveal that there are similarities and differences between studies with adults and this research data. As similarity, both apply epenthesis process to simplify the onset sequence, although adults showed greater use. As difference the subject voiced the fricative /s/ without applying epenthesis, a strategy that does not often arise in adult data. The results obtained show strict relation with sonority scale and with sonority distance between the onset members. Onset can be reversal or not, it depends if it violates or not the sonority sequencing principle, however the minimum distance of two sonority degrees between onset elements seems to be respected. The theoretical contributions in this study allowed generalizations about the acquisition of initial /s/ complex onsets in English by a native speaker of Brazilian Portuguese