Estudo sobre o "VOT" na aquisição das plosivas do português brasileiro

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the role that VOT (Voice Onset Time) fulfills in process of acquisition of the voicing contrast between the stop segments that integrate the phonology of Brasilian Portuguese (PB). Children studied belong to a community in Rio Grande do Sul, Vista Alegre do Prata, which uses a variant of PB that still maintains contact with Polish and Italian, languages spoken by the older generations and that permeate the linguistic environment of family and regional contact. The research focuses on the VOT as a phonetic clue that can be used in the process of language acquisition, mainly for the establishment of the phonological value of the feature [voice], but which can also support the determination of the contrast between the place feature [ labial], [coronal] and [dorsal] in the class of stop consonants. In the discussion of the phonetic and phonological development process, through the analysis of VOT values in the class of stop consonants of PB the relationship between the linguistic forms of the children and those of their Caregivers is addressed. The corpus of this research consisted of linguistic data from four children aged 1: 4 to 2: 2, two boys and two girls; they are data of spontaneous speech that belong to the bank constituted by Souza (2015). From the corpus, all the target words that presented stop consonants were transcribed and submitted to acoustic analysis in the Praat program. The VOT values of each segment for each child were recorded, as well as the VOT values of the stop produced by their Caregivers. The analysis of the results showed that the children of Vista Alegre do Prata, in the process of acquiring Portuguese stops, suffer a preponderant influence of their Caregivers and that the VOT can be used as the primary clue for the acquisition of the phonological value of the feature [± voice] and can still be used as a secondary clue for the acquisition of place contrast in phonology of PB stop consonant class. Key words: Phonological acquisition; Portuguese stops; VOT; Acoustic analysis; [voicing] Feature; Place features.