SW or WS for the primary accent in Brazilian Portuguese: the clues of a non-transparent system
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.22481/el.v21i1.13371Keywords:
Distribution of prosodic patterns; Syllable duration; Vowel distribution; Clues for phonological acquisition.Abstract
In this article, we discuss which clues the child uses from the input to set the prosodic foot (Sw) or (wS) in a language with a non-transparent accent algorithm, such as Brazilian Portuguese. Four characteristics were investigated: exposure to the accent patterns of the target language (adult speech and child directed-speech), the distribution of vowels according to stress and position in the word (pre and post-stress), the duration of vowels in unstressed syllables and familiar words, and the stress patterns of baby talk. We contrast the analysis of these clues in Brazilian Portuguese with five other languages: European Portuguese, English, Spanish, Dutch and Modern Hebrew. For the distribution of stress patterns, we observed that all languages, except Hebrew, present a greater distribution of the penultimate accent; however, since Brazilian children produce more wS than SW in the beginning of the acquisition process, we assume that they do not use this distribution pattern as clue for the stress foot. For the vowel chart, we found that only Portuguese has a difference in the number of vowels in pre- and post-stressed syllables, thus characterizing it as a clue only in this language. For duration, we found that pre-stressed syllables have a longer duration than post-stressed syllables in Portuguese, and post-stressed longer than pre-stressed in English and Dutch; in Spanish and Hebrew there is no difference between them. For familiar words, English, Spanish and Dutch have a predominance of penultimate stress words, similar to the target language; on the other hand, Portuguese in its two varieties and Hebrew show divergence between the pattern of familiar words and the target language. While we argue that baby talk is not a clue for Hebrew stress, we conclude that the ws pattern for Brazilian baby talk presents the default pattern for the stress algorithm.
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