Patterns in the acquisition of some cognate consonants in portuguese

Abstract

Acquiring the phonology of a language requires the development of a high complex series of processes on which, unfortunately, we still lack much information. As a result of the uniqueness of languages we are faced with the problem of identifying these processes and their ordering of appearance in apparently a quite distinct manner within each language and from child to child. While the general trend is that children use systematic patterns to distinguish between cognate pairs of sounds, these patterns may vary from language to language. Moreover, this discrimination task may be a result of the acquisition of different skills acquired at different stages (cf. Macken and Barton, 1979).