Syllable phonological characteristics in orthographic transpositions in children's writing and in metatheses in children's speech

• Grant number: 21/08143-1
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Master's degree
• Start date: November 01, 2021
• End date: January 31, 2022
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics - Linguistic Theory and Analysis
• Principal Investigator: Lourenço Chacon Jurado Filho
• Grantee: Mirian Verza Amarante
• Supervisor: Maria Joao dos Reis de Freitas
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia e Ciências (FFC). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Marília. Marília , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal
• Associated to the scholarship: 20/05114-8 - Phonetic-phonological characteristics of the syllable in orthographic transpositions in elementary school, BP.MS

Abstract

It is possible to identify, in national and international literature, studies - not always agreeing - that are concerned as much with investigating the complexity of the relationships between phonological characteristics in speech and orthographic characteristics in writing, as with describing children's spelling performance by analyzing spelling errors and their typologies. Considering that, although evidently related, aspects of speech do not have direct links with aspects of spelling and that spelling errors are part of the acquisition of the Brazilian Portuguese spelling system, we sought to improve our study, under development in Brazil, which investigates characteristics of a type of specific error frequently found in children's writing: the orthographic transposition. This type of error corresponds to displacements of graphemes from their conventional position in the writing of the word to another position within the word. It is therefore a question of looking at this phenomenon in the light of what, in phonological theory, is understood (in children's speech) as metathesis. Therefore, we propose to observe, considering the phonology/orthography relation, to what extent the orthographic transpositions accompany the metatheses in children's speech. Thus, we sought, both for data on orthographic transpositions, and for data on metatheses in speech (1) to describe the distribution of transpositions as they occur in the form of permutations, intersyllabic transpositions and intrasyllabic transpositions, as proposed by Chacon and Pezarini (2018); (2) to verify structural characteristics of the syllable at the transposition exit point; (3) to verify the possible influence of accent on transposition displacements. This way, we will be able to compare, among themselves, the trends verified in the orthographic transpositions and in the metatheses of children's speech. We hope, with the development of the research, in a broader sense, to contribute to a better understanding of how two distinct modes of enunciation (speech and writing) operate and relate to a plane of language that directly unites them in the children's writing: the phonological. And in a stricter sense, we seek to fill in research gaps, due to the scarcity of studies that focus on relations between metatheses in children's speech and orthographic transpositions.