Repair strategies used in the acquisition of obstruents in two municipalities in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

PURPOSE:

to determine the repair strategies used in the acquisition of obstruents in two municipalities of the state of Rio Grande do Sul that receive different dialectal influences, by describing and comparing the intervening variables in this process.

METHODS:

72 children participated in the study, 36 from the municipality of Santa Maria and 36 from Agudo, aged between 1:0 and 4:0 (years: months). The corpora of Santa Maria and Agudo were composed by 3,178 and 3,847 analyzed obstruents, respectively. The analyzed repair strategies were desonorization, omission, posteriorization, anteriorization, plosivization of fricatives, and others. The extralinguistic variables were age, gender, type of input, metrical foot, number of syllables, preceding and following syllable context, position in the word, grammatical class, voicing and class of obstruent. Statistical analysis was performed using the software package VARBRUL, with a significance level of 5%.

RESULTS:

there was a prevalence of the omission strategy in Santa Maria and the posteriorization strategy in Agudo. Desonorization was the least frequently used resource in both groups. There were both similarities and differences when the intervening variables were compared.

CONCLUSION:

based on the results, it was concluded that dialectal variation did not interfere in the choice of resources employed by subjects from Agudo, which could occur due to input received in this municipality, i.e. desonorized phonemes.

Child; Speech; Language Development