ABSTRACT
Purpose
Describing the word classes and phonological classes’ acquisition of the Brazilian Portuguese in children typically developed and verifying the correlations between these two language systems.
Methods
In this study 186 children with typical language development, aged from 1 year, 6 months to 5 years, 11 months, who were Brazilian Portuguese speakers took part. The data collection involved speech, language and hearing assessments and spontaneous speech recordings. The production probabilities of each sound class were considered and the words produced were divided into word classes. The correlations among sound and word classes were analyzed.
Results
Nasals and stops are the first sounds acquired followed by fricatives and liquids. Nouns and verbs are the first word classes produced. Regarding to statistically significant correlations, stops were positively correlated with nouns, adjectives, adverbs and pronouns. Fricatives had a lot of positive and negative correlations with different word classes. Liquids had positive correlations with adjectives and articles; and negative correlations with nouns, adverbs and numerals. No correlation was found among nasals and the sound classes.
Conclusion
The acquisition of stops and nasals are precocious. The fricatives and liquids are more complex. Nouns and verbs are prevalent in the beginning of acquisition. The elements mostly related to syntax are acquired later. There are many correlations between phonology and vocabulary, showing a clear relationship between one another.
Child; Preschool; Child language; Speech; Vocabulary