Padrões de coocorrência CV na aquisição do Português Brasileiro em crianças de 1 a 3 anos

Abstract

In this work we investigate, in the light of Gestural Phonology and the Frame/Content Theory (FCT), syllabic patterns of CV co-occurrence in the acquisition data of Brazilian Portuguese (BP). The CV biases – labial consonants with central vowels, coronal consonants with front vowels and dorsal consonants with back vowels – observed in babbling and first words have been taken as evidence for the role of biomechanics inertia, postulated by FCT (MACNEILAGE, 1998; DAVIS, MACNEILAGE, 1995) to explain the basis of the canonical syllable. FCT departs from an evolutionary perspective to explain the emergence of such biases, assuming that speech emerged through the sole combination of opening and closing jaw movements - without any contribution from other articulators. On the other hand, Gestural Phonology highlights the fact that the infant’s development is subordinated to more general principles of dynamics. Thus, the coordination among the gestures of articulators – which are potentially independent from the beginning of the process of language acquisition – plays a central role in the interpretation of the biases, which is in line with current views of the role of speech motor coordination in phonology (Goldstein et al., 2006). In order to investigate whether the patterns of CV co-occurrence reported in the literature are found in BP, we based this study on corpus research, from the LIDES Database, constituted of two oral bases: child and adult spontaneous speech. The speech registers are 10 children, aged between 1 and 3 years old and their caregivers. The entire sample was 173,075 CV structures resulting from sampling over a year at intervals of 30 days, with approximately 100 hours of recorded audio. The analysis was divided into four semesters corresponding to the age of the children studied. The computation of the combinations CV was performed by macro-commands developed for this study, along with the linguistic software WordSmith Tools (SCOTT, 2008). We analyzed the combinations of labial consonants, coronal and dorsal in co-occurrence with front vowels, central and back, considering type and token frequency. The qualitative and quantitative analysis consisted of tests of association between pairs CV based on tests chi-square (2), Cramer’s V, O/E ratio and Freeman-Tukey deviates (FT). We investigated the CV patterns, accentual patterns and also lexical patterns of the two groups. The results evidence that the CV structures identified in literature are recurring part on data from the PB. The combinations are consistent with the theory Frame/Content were found in the frequencies of types for the coronal and in a smaller proportion to the dorsal, the token frequencies there is more correspondence with the appearance of bias in labial consonants. However, such biases indicate the dependency related to the tonicity of the context of the vowel. The analysis of lexical items in both corpora found evidence for the influence of adult input in the development of children's speech. Finally, we suggest that the biases are related to cultural matrix language environment aggregates to the biomechanical perspective that privileges vision dynamics in the acquisition of speech.