O desenvolvimento fonético-fonológico do inglês como língua não nativa por crianças em fase aquisicional do PB

Abstract

The processes of phonological simplification which characterize the phonetic-phonological development of English, as a non-native language (NNL), by children in the acquisition phase of Portuguese as a native language (NL) are investigate in this dissertation. The children underwent the experience of having contact with the English NNL in the daycare they attended. This happened on the university campus of the Universidade Estadual do Sudoeste da Bahia – UESB, through the institutional research project identified as POACE Project – Promoting Oral Communication in English: Daycare Project, coordinated by the author of this study. The children attended one-hour weekly meetings, which were coordinated by the project team members. The activities involving the English language in the daycare enabled the gathering of data that compiled the information file analyzed in this research. These data refer to the phonetic-phonological simplification of English in a bilingual context where both Brazilian Portuguese NL and English NNL were in use. The theoretical discussion is based on the Complex view of language and language development (Beckner et al., 2009; Kupske, 2016, 2017; Larsen-Freeman, 1997, 2007; Paiva, 2014) which concern both he individual scope and the social interactions that encompass this phenomenon, causing the perception of the language, of the children developing that language, and of the data produced by them on a horizontal scale of importance. I also discussed the constitution of phonology through its use (Bybee, 2006, 2016), which allows the speakers to extract the linguistic patterns from the environment that will constitute their grammar and speech, and also the bilingualism which encourages the discussion about the mutual influence between languages (Grosjean, 2003; Souza, 2012, 2021). Finally, the phonological simplification processes that characterize the development of English NL (Ingram, 1981, 1986, 1989[1976]) and of Brazilian Portuguese NL (Teixeira, 2009, 2011, 2015, 2020). The classification of phonological processes of the later author was used as the reference for the data analysis. The analysis revealed that the children in the study used: (a) processes and implementational strategies that were coincident; (b) coincident processes, but different implementational strategies and; (c) processes and strategies that were typical of the English NNL context.