PRE-SCHOLARS WRITING OF THE PHONEME /A/

acoustic-hearing cues

Abstract

The aims of this study were: (i) verified in with measure the children record the /a/ phoneme in nasalization context (ii) in case of records, which type of writing record, conventional or deviant, the children used to mark such phoneme; (iii) to search for possible links between the written records used by the children and the hearing-acoustical cues that these records might indicate. The analysis was realized from of a corpus constituted by 20 prescholars’ texts showing the writing of /aN/ in 08 words adding up to 160 tokens. We verified that the children wrote the phoneme /aN/ in 127 words (79%). Conversely, most of the writings (86%) were deviant records. In addition, the vocalic writing was present in 94% of the deviant records. That occurrence may be explained in perceptual-hearing terms once the vocalic characteristics are enhanced by the hearing system. The outcome suggested that the children have a strong support on hearing-acoustical cues of speech during writing acquisition.