METÁTESE E EPÊNTESE NA AQUISIÇÃO DA FONOLOGIA DO PB ?UMA ANÁLISE COM BASE NA TEORIA DA OTIMIDADE

by da Silva, Clarissa Diassul

The aim of this research was to investigate the motivation behind the application of theMetathesis and the Epenthesis processes by children who are acquiring Brazilian Portugueseas their first language. The occurrences of reordination of sounds in the same syllable or wordand/or the reordination of syllables inside the word were identified as Metathesis. The onlykind of Metathesis which occurred in this study was the Segmental Metathesis, that is, thecase that shows the inversion of only one segment in the word. The Epenthesis wascharacterized by the insertion of a vocalic or consonantal segment in the word. The datashowed that the occurrence of the Vocalic Epenthesis was prevalent, and that the vowel [i]was the predominant epenthetic segment. The corpus of the investigation was constituted bydata from 220 children presenting normal phonological development, aged between 1:3 and4:2 (years: months). The results revealed that children use the Metathesis and Epenthesisprocesses when they face complex syllabic structures, constituted by CCV and CVCstructures in the majority of cases. The research showed that the Optimality Theory proved tobe a pertinent theoretical model for the analysis of the data, since the interaction amongconstraints was capable not only of characterizing the occurrence of Metathesis and/orEpenthesis in the grammar that identifies the developmental stages of the children, but also ofcapturing and explaining the conspiracy that the simultaneous application of the Metathesisand Epenthesis processes create to avoid complex syllabic structures, such as CCV and CVC,in output forms