Quantas sílabas tem “cháv(e)na”? Sobre o impacto dos apagamentos vocálicos na segmentação silábica de crianças no ensino pré-escolar

Resumo

The current study discusses the type of linguistic information assessed
during the performance of tasks designed to test phonological awareness: (i) phonological knowledge, stored in the phonological representations in the mental lexicon; (ii) phonetic detail, available in the acoustic stimuli. We therefore evaluated 23 Portuguese children (mean age: 5;04), all preschoolers, in order to avoid the effect of orthographic representations. All children were submitted to a word segmentation task, which included 19 distractor stimuli and 7 target stimuli controlled for the presence/absence of unstressed vowels, based on the possible phonetic formats of these words in spontaneous speech.
The results showed that children do not process the stimuli on the basis of one single type of linguistic information (phonological information in the lexical representations or acoustic properties of the stimuli). The children’s answers, namely the ones coded as segmentation errors, lead us to the formulate an hypothesis according to which several strategies may be activated during performance of tasks designed to assess phonological awareness: processing the word’s phonological representation; processing the phonetic detail in the acoustic stimulus; processing representations of different phonetic formats of
a single word in European Portuguese, which seem to be part of the children’s awareness of their language.