O rato roeu a rolha: sobre a aquisição do rótico dorsal por crianças portuguesas com perfis típico e atípico

Resumo

In the literature about European Portuguese (EP) it is discussed the phonological nature of the two rhotic consonants /ʀ/ and /ɾ/, contrastive only in intervocalic position (Barbosa, 1983; Mateus & Andrade, 2000; Amorim & Veloso, 2018). The rhotic /ʀ/ in EP has a wide free variation: [ʀ, ʁ, χ, x, r] (Jesus & Shadle, 2005; Rennicke & Martins, 2012; Rodrigues 2015). Data from typical acquisition in EP has shown that /ʀ/ is acquired before /ɾ/ in simple onsets (Mendes et al., 2009/13; Costa, 2010; Amorim, 2014), with obstruent allophones reported for
/ʀ/. In this paper, we will analyze data from two samples: (i) a sample of 87 children with an age range of 2;11 to 6;06 years old, from the Lisbon district, monolingual in EP, without linguistic development disorders (Ramalho, 2017); (ii) a sample of 9 children with primary phonological disorder, with an age range from 3;0 to 7;6, from the Évora district. The data were collected with
the application of the CLCP-PE instrument and were analyzed with PHON (Hedlund & Rose, 2019). All phonetic occurrences of /ʀ/ were considered, and then compared with realization of the targets /ɾ/, /l/ e / ʎ /, always in simple onset. In the typical development sample, the rates for /ʀ, ɾ/ were above 80% which means the acquisition of both segments at 3;00. On the other
hand, in the atypical development sample, /ʀ, ɾ/ have distinctive behaviors: /ʀ/ has success rates above 50% and /ɾ/ below 50%. In both samples the more frequent phonetic variants are [ʁ, χ, x, ʀ], which shows an approximation to the obstruent class. Our data constitute a contribution to the phonological status of /ʀ/ in EP, supporting the hypothesis of the existence of two rhotic phonemes in EP (cf. Miranda, 1996; Bonet & Mascaró, 1997).