Comparative study about the acquisition of obstruents at two municipalities with different linguistic influences

Abstract

Objective: Verify the acquisition of obstruents in children speech with typical phonological development of two cities in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, who have different linguistic varieties. Methods: Seventy two children participated in the study, 36 of Santa Maria city, 36 of Agudo city, ages 1:0 and 4:0 (years: months). The corpus of Santa Maria was composed of 3,178 obstruents analyzed and 3,847 at Agudo. In the dependent variable correct and incorrect productions (repair strategies) were considered. The extralinguistic variables considered were age, sex, input type and the linguistic were metrical foot, number of syllables, preceding syllable and following context, word position, grammatical class, sonority and class of obstruent. Statistical analysis used the VARBRUL package, with a 5% of significance.Results: The results were similar for the two municipalities. For Santa Maria, significant intervening variables were: age, metrical foot, number of syllables, class of obstruent and the preceding syllable and following context. For Agudo were selected the same variables, replacing the number of syllables by sonority. The variable input type was selected in a single group, as well as age. Conclusion: There were more similarities than differences in intervening variables which influence the acquisition of obstruents. Therefore, it seems no dialectal influence in the acquisition of sonority contrast of the segments in the study, which could occur due to the desonorization characteristic in speech of adults living in the city of Agudo