Purpose
: to describe and to analyze the repair strategies used by children with normal phonological acquisition and phonological disorder in the complex onset syllable constituent, in order to examine the similarities as well as the differences in the studied groups.
Method
: the analysis included speech data from 60 children with normal acquisition, 30 male and 30 female, in addition to 84 children with deviation, 53 male and 31 female. The age in the normal group was between 1:0 and 4:0, whereas in the deviation group it was between 3:0 and 11:0. The variables age, gender, preceding and following context, obstruent of complex onset , kind of liquid of complex onset , tonicity, number of syllables and position in the word were considered. Then, the data were submitted to statistical analysis in the VARBRUL program.
Results
: the children with normal acquisition and deviation used the following resources, respectively: simplification strategies for C 1 V (93%; 77%), alteration of the obstruent feature (5%; 17%), alteration of the liquid feature (1%; 5%), epenthesis (1%; 0%) and metathesis (0%; 1%). The variables tonicity, preceding context and position in the word were not relevant to the study.
Conclusion
: the most frequent resource was the simplification for C 1 V in both groups, but other strategies were applied, mainly in the deviation group. Considering the influence of the variables, it was possible to conclude that the variables: age, gender, kind of obstruent, kind of liquid of complex onset , following context and number of syllables influenced the studied resources.
Speech; Language Development; Child Language; Speech Disorders
