Aspectos fonológicos e morfo-sintácticos da aquisição do ditongo nasal em Português Europeu

Abstract

One single phonetic shape may be the output form of diff erent phonological and/or morphosyntactic structures. In the case of nasal diphthongs in European Portuguese, lexical items from diff erent word classes (in the present study, nouns, verbs and adverbs) may exhibit a word-fi nal nasal diphthong, associated to diff erent morphophonological and morpohsyntactic sequences: in the nominal and the adjectival paradigms, the use of the diphthong involves a morphophonological contrast in the singular and the plural forms, while in the verbal paradigm and in adverbs no allophonic nor allomorphic variation is attested. It is assumed that allomorphy is acquired in later stages of development. Th us, in case allomorphic variation plays a role in the acquisition of the nasal diphthong, we expect the structure to become stable earlier in verbs and adverbs than in nouns. However, it is known that nouns emerge earlier than verbs in the path of language acquisition, which predicts the earlier acquisition of the nasal diphthong in the former word class. Taking these two predictions into account, in this paper we aim at evaluating the role of the above mentioned grammatical aspects in the acquisition of nasal diphthongs. Th e data observed 1 Este trabalho foi realizado no âmbito do projecto Aquisição do Português europeu: Recursos e resultados linguísticos, desenvolvido no Centro de Linguística da Universidade de Lisboa (CLUL) e fi nanciado pela Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (PTDC/LIN/68024/2006). 250 M. João Freitas / Anabela Gonçalves / Fernanda Gonçalves in this study show that the acquisition of a specifi c phonological structure may not be homogeneous across word classes: (i) a better performance for target nasal diphthongs in nouns and verbs than in adverbs was attested, which shows a contrast between lexical and functional words; (ii) within lexical word classes, nouns promote the acquisition of the structure studied, showing that the complexity associated to the nominal paradigm does not demote its acquisition. Considering the word class eff ect identifi ed in the current study, our claim is that methodological procedures in the fi eld of phonological acquisition should take into consideration morphosyntactic aspects when evaluating the acquisition of specifi c phonological structures.