The acquisition of pre-tonic vowels in Brazilian Portuguese

Abstract

This article discusses the acquisition of the pretonic vowels in Brazilian Portuguese, by 3 monolingual children acquiring the paulista dialect, aged between 1;4 and 3;5, and its relation to the acquisition of stressed vowels. Based on Miranda (2013), we start out from the supposition that the acquisition of pretonic vowels is subject to the instability of this position, and segments affected by phonological processes take longer to be acquired. The children’s productions show that the high pretonic vowels are acquired in contrast with the mid vowels, (/i,o/ and /e,u/), and that the pretonic /o/ is acquired before /e/. We analyse these results based on the Contrastive Hierarchy Theory (Dresher 2009), according to which the lexical representation of segments is specific to each language and only contrastive and active feature must be present in the representation. We propose that the acquisition of pretonic vowels follows the Maximum Contrast Principle: because of the instability found in this position, segments must be maximally contrastive, that is, they must contrast in place and height. The pretonic /e/, being more unstable (cf. Callou, Morais and Leite (2002), Viegas (2001) and Yacovenco (1993)), is the last one to be acquired, bringing with it the pretonic /u/.