Relações entre fonologia e ortografia na distinção de sonoridade de consoantes obstruintes na escrita infantil nos primeiros anos de escolarização

Abstract

In this research the objective is to describe and analyze the written representation of Portuguese obstruent consonants (/p-b, t-d, k-g, f-v, s-z, ʃ-Ʒ/), in relation to the sonority feature, in texts written by children from the 1st to the 3rd year in Elementary School, establishing relations between phonology and orthography. Quantitatively and qualitatively, were analyzed 299 spontaneous texts from students who were attending the 1st to 3rd year at three municipal public schools in the city of Pelotas/ RS, identified here as Schools A, B and C. The texts, collected during 2014 and 2015, are part of Stratum 7 of the Bank of Written Language Acquisition Texts (BATALE) collection. The description and data analysis were based on a dependent variable and eight independent variables; in seven variables it is possible to see focus on the linguistic structure and in one the focus is on an extralinguistic factor, which are: I) articulation point of the obstruent, II) articulation point alteration direction, III) obstruent articulation way, IV) direction of the change of the obstruent articulation way, V) syllable of the obstruent related to the accent, VI) syllable of the obstruent related to the structure, VII) syllable of the obstruent related to the position in the word, and VIII) school year of the child. Three questions showed by data are pointed out, related to written representation of obstruent phonemes according to the sonority trait: (a) the correct answers surpassed the errors, reaching an index of 98.94%; (b) there were errors related to the voicing and devoicing phonological processes, with a small predominance of devoicing errors (1.09%) compared to voicing data (1.02%); (c) errors related to the written record of the obstruent voicing trait, although with low frequency, were present in the first three years of schooling, although they were predominant in the 1st year in Schools A and C. This errors recurrence shows up the complexity of mapping, for graphemes, the sonority opposition that exists between the pairs of obstruent phonemes, where is located the motivation for changes in both directions in the written representation of the feature: sonorization and devoicing. Following Seymour (1997), errors connected to the sonority feature recording are attributed to a problem of access to phonological knowledge related to this contrast type, which can be further worsened by the multiple correspondence between some phonemes and graphemes. It is considered that errors result from the mapping upset between phonemes and graphemes, which is explained by the articulation between cognitive modules of orthographic processing proposed by Seymour (1997), and also result from the bottom-up processing complexity, necessary in the alphabetic writing acquisition, which makes the child deal with phonemes (and distinctive features) and graphemes.