THE ACQUISITION OF PRE-TONIC VOWELS IN BRAZILIAN PORTUGUESE

ABSTRACT

This article discusses acquisition of pre-tonic vowels in Brazilian Portuguese by 3 monolingual children acquiring the paulista dialect, aged between 1;4 and 3;5, and its relation to the acquisition of stressed vowels. Based on Miranda (2013), we start out from the supposition that the acquisition of pre-tonic vowels is subject to the instability of this position, and segments affected by phonological processes take longer to be acquired. The children’s productions show that high pre-tonic vowels are acquired in contrast with mid vowels, (/i,o/ and /e,u/), and that the pre-tonic /o/ is acquired before /e/. We analyse these results based on Contrastive Hierarchy Theory (DRESHER, 2009), according to which the lexical representation of segments is specific to each language and only contrastive and active features must be present in the representation. We propose that the acquisition of pre-tonic vowels follows the Principle of Maximum Contrast: because of the instability found in this position, segments must be maximally contrastive; that is, they must contrast in place and height. The pre-tonic /e/, being more unstable (cf. CALLOU; MORAES; LEITE, 2002; VIEGAS, 2001; YACOVENCO, 1993), is the last one to be acquired, bringing with it the pretonic /u/.

Phonological acquisition; Phonological contrast; Pretonic vowel