Aquisição segmental e prosódica nas produções verbais de crianças prematuras

Abstract

When acquiring a language, the child begins to make adjustments to produce the target language (MATZENAUER; MIRANDA, 2010; MATZENAUER, 2015 PAYÃO; COSTA, 2016). This acquisition can be affected by gestational age and weight. This study started from the hypothesis that there are gaps between consonant, vocalic and premature prosodic segmental acquisitions, correlating gestational age with birth weight. The objective of this research was to analyze the consonant, vocal and prosodic segmental acquisition in the verbal productions of premature babies, considering the gestational age and birth weight. This study compared the number of consonant and vowel segments and the number of phonological processes in preterm infants over the six collections, taking as a reference the segmental and prosodic acquisition indicated by the literature on typical development of BP. The spontaneous speech data of eleven children, assessed between 12 and 25 months, comes from a longitudinal database collected between 2014 and 2018. The findings show that premature babies did not produce all segments of the Portuguese language until the corrected age of 20 months. The correction of age did not compensate for the existence of the delay present in premature infants. Prosodic acquisition proved to be out of date in terms of segmental filling of unstressed and stressed syllables, since the stressed syllable stood out in relation to unstressed syllables and the most relevant phonological processes were the non-realization of one syllable or more and the non-realization of a segment in simple start. Premature babies are delayed because they do not fill segments in all syllabic positions, which can affect language performance at later ages.