The Vowel [i] in the Acquisition of European Portuguese

Abstract

"Research on the acquisition of L1 phonology in the last decades has been primarily concerned with featural architecture of segments and with prosodic constituency; reports on acquisition of phonological processes and implications of this aspect on the mastery of the internal structure of segments are scarse in the literature (see Bernhardt & Stemberger 1998, Hayes to appear). The description of allophonic (and allomorphic) alternations in children's production data is, however, a crucial aspect for the debate on how children build lexical representations (see Bybee 2001, Fikkert & Freitas 2002, Dupoux 2002). The study of schwa in children's data is one of the topics that provide us empirical evidence to observe the acquisition of allophonic variation since this segment is often an instance of an underlying full vowel in languages with vowel reduction. Research on the acquisition of languages like European Portuguese (EP) - where the process of vowel reduction in unstressed position is highly productive and affects both the phonological and the morphological structure of words - may therefore contribute for the discussion on how children build their lexical representations in early stages"