PURPOSE: to investigate the acquisition of the consonantal meetings in children speakers of the non-standard Portuguese in Recife, considering linguistic and social variables. METHODS: 100 children of public schools and nurseries took part in the study, being 50 boys and 50 girls, with ages between 2:0 and 6: 11-year old, divided in 10 groups with intervals of six months. We applied a socioeconomic questionnaire and a phonological evaluation test. RESULTS: discrete differences at the beginning of production and domain of complex onset between the sexes were found, having a trend for an earlier acquisition from girls. About the ages of beginning for production and domain, we observed the beginning of production from 2:0 - 2:5-year old, and the domain from 4:0 - 4:5-year old, earlier than the described in most of the literature. We also observed that the meeting composed by obstruent + /r/ was acquired before the composed by obstruent + /l/. Regarding to linguistics variables, we verified influence of the tonicity, the syllabic structure and the preceding and consequent linguistic context on the phonogical acquisition. Regarding social variables we did not observe important correlations between the maternal education level or familiar income with the phonological acquisition. CONCLUSION: regional differences were observed on the phonological acquisition of the Brazilian Portuguese and those differences should be considered during the phonological evaluation process, mainly if this evaluation is to have purposes of diagnosis as for the phonological disorders, under penalty to commit incorrect and biased diagnostic from the sociolinguistic point of view.
Child; Speech; Language Development; Child Language
