Hypercorrections in writing as evidence of the child phonological grammar

Abstract

This paper examines the influence of the phonological grammar in the acquisition of written Brazilian Portuguese. Our focus is to identify children’s hypercorrections based on three phonological phenomena: vowel harmony, vowel raising and post-vocalic l-vocalization. The work is based on the following prediction: at the moment the child is confronted with the written language and realizes that leters do not always correspond to phonemes, in addition to correcting his/her initial orthographic errors, he/she is also expected to overgeneralize his/her corrections to unnecessary written forms. This study also seeks to find empirical evidence that shows how active a child’s phonological grammar is in the acquisition of writing since it is expected that these hypercorretions are governed by phonological restrictions of the language. In order to address these issues, we analyzed initial writing data from a database organized by the Aspa Project of the Federal University of Minas Gerais, E-labore (Electronic Laboratory of Orality and Writing) (CRISTÓFARO-SILVA et al., 2009). The results show that there are, indeed, hypercorretions related to phonological processes in the acquisition of written Brazilian Portuguese and that these are mainly governed by phonological restrictions of the language.