Initial prosodic acquisition: a proposal of stages

Andressa Toscano Moura de Caldas Barros de Almeida,
Ester Mirian Scarpa,
Marianne Carvalho Bezerra Cavalcante
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Abstract

In recent years, increasing attention has been given to studies that focus on prosody, recognizing the value of this aspect of language in interaction. It is known, therefore, that prosody not only covers the suprasegmental structures of languages, but is also responsible for the rhythm, tone and intonation system (SCARPA, 1999). In this way, we chose prosody as a whole, and intonation in particular, as an object of study within language acquisition. We therefore seek to address the first intonational system of a child's speech in four moments of functioning (babbling, jargon, first words and utterance blocks), characterizing and mapping their intonational development from 1;0 to 1;6 of life. Thus, in our analyses, we observed that even the one-syllable utterances of our subject are not produced in an intonational vacuum. When analyzing the tonal development of our subject, we noticed that the first distinctive contours of his intonational system are of the ascending or descending type, and it was only from 1;4 onwards that the child's first words had pitch variations recognized as different speech acts, and only at 1;6 do we map an expansion of tones, with ascending, descending, ascending-descending and descending-ascending variations in his speech.


 

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