Descriptive study of orthographic insertions in children's writing

• Grant number: 23/06939-9
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: September 01, 2023
• End date: December 31, 2024
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics - Linguistic Theory and Analysis
• Principal Investigator: Lourenço Chacon Jurado Filho
• Grantee: Maria Eduarda Gomes Vitti
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia e Ciências (FFC). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Marília. Marília , SP, Brazil

Abstract

Children's orthography has aroused particular interest in scholars in fields such as health, education, and linguistics. Such interest is due to the search for understanding, on the behalf of these scholars, of how the systematic functioning of orthography is shown in the writing of children in the early years of Elementary School. During this period, children's writing does not exactly follow orthographic conventions, because the emphasis on orthographic regularities is not expected in those years, once it is on the alphabetic principle. It is the moment in which non-conventional orthographic occurrences are privileged in this writing - those occurrences outside the norms that regulate the correspondence between phonemes of the language and graphemes, the basis of the alphabetic principle. A very frequent type of these occurrences in the orthography of children in early years of Elementary School are the orthographic insertions - additions of graphemes in positions not foreseen by the conventional orthography of the word. Such insertions are mentioned in the literature (Simões and Martins, 2018; Santana and Reis, 2016; Miranda, 2014). However, since they are only mentioned, they do not constitute a specific object of investigation in the literature, which does not enable us to understand their characteristics in children's orthography. Aiming to expand the descriptions from the literature made about them, this paper has the general objective of describing characteristics of grapheme insertions in children's orthography. In order to achieve this goal, the investigation will be guided by the following specific objectives: (1) to map, in written productions made by children from the early years of Elementary School, the occurrences of orthographic insertions; and (2) to identify, among those that are explained by epenthetic processes, which characteristics of these processes would anchor the appearance of such insertions in children's orthography. The data will be extracted from a database composed of texts written by children who, at the time of collection, in 2016, were attending the five first years of Elementary School. This database is composed of 508 narratives produced by 106 children. As for the results related to the first objective, firstly, the texts with orthographic insertions will be identified from the 508 texts in the sample. After this identification, its occurrences will be divided (in each text and in the total of them) into two main groups: (1) the one composed by insertions that do not correspond to phonetic-phonological processes of the language; and (b) the one composed of insertions that present such correspondence. As for the results related to the second objective, the possible and different epenthetic aspects that would anchor its occurrence will be sought in the insertions that compose the second group. With the results, it is expected providing subsidies for the training and (pedagogical and clinical) practice of professionals in fields such as Education and Speech Therapy who deal with orthographic issues in their clinical and educational practices.