Complexidade prosódica e segmentação de palavras em crianças dos 4 aos 6 anos de idade

Abstract

The main goal of the current study is to identify the impact of specific linguistic aspects in the task of word syllabic segmentation. Three prosodic variables were considered: syllabic complexity, word extension and word stress. The instruments for the evaluation of phonological awareness are normally conceived without underlying criteria constraining the shape of the phonological stimuli used for data collection. The present study contributes for the discussion on the relevant variables to be taken into account for the proposal of a linguistically controlled evaluation instrument in the field of phonological awareness. The syllabic segmentation task used contains 42 words and it was presented to a group of 80 Portuguese children with of mean age of 64 months. For the ‘syllabic complexity’ variable, the Onset of the first syllable of the word was controlled (CV, V, CCV). The results showed that children reach a higher rate of success for word-initial CV and V than for branching Onset. The reaction time values obtained show that the segmentation for word-initial V and CV forms are lower than the ones for word-initial CCV. As for the variable ‘word extension’, the success rates depended on this aspect: disyllabic words are easier to segment than disyllabic ones. Finally, the ‘word stress’ variable showed that the penultimate stress pattern in trisyllabic words promote the success in the children’s performance.