METÁTESE E EPÊNTESE NA AQUISIÇÃO DA FONOLOGIA DO PB UMA ANÁLISE COM BASE NA TEORIA DA OTIMIDADE

Abstract

The aim of this research was to investigate the motivation behind the application of the Metathesis and the Epenthesis processes by children who are acquiring Brazilian Portuguese as their first language. The occurrences of reordination of sounds in the same syllable or word and/or the reordination of syllables inside the word were identified as Metathesis. The only kind of Metathesis which occurred in this study was the Segmental Metathesis, that is, the case that shows the inversion of only one segment in the word. The Epenthesis was characterized by the insertion of a vocalic or consonantal segment in the word. The data showed that the occurrence of the Vocalic Epenthesis was prevalent, and that the vowel [i] was the predominant epenthetic segment. The corpus of the investigation was constituted by data from 220 children presenting normal phonological development, aged between 1:3 and 4:2 (years: months). The results revealed that children use the Metathesis and Epenthesis processes when they face complex syllabic structures, constituted by CCV and CVC structures in the majority of cases. The research showed that the Optimality Theory proved to be a pertinent theoretical model for the analysis of the data, since the interaction among constraints was capable not only of characterizing the occurrence of Metathesis and/or Epenthesis in the grammar that identifies the developmental stages of the children, but also of capturing and explaining the conspiracy that the simultaneous application of the Metathesis and Epenthesis processes create to avoid complex syllabic structures, such as CCV and CVC, in output forms