Acento gráfico e prosódico: um estudo sobre as hipóteses de crianças dos anos iniciais

Abstract

This dissertation aimed at studying the relations between the graphic accent and the prosodic one in Brazilian Portuguese, based on production and perception data provided by third and fifth graders who attend Elementary School. The focus was their hypotheses on the graphic accent; besides, relations among how the accent is used, explanations given to its use and the prosodic operation of Brazilian Portuguese were investigated. This text employed the perspective of the metric theory (HAYES, 1981, 1995; BISOL, 1992,1994) to analyze accents in Portuguese, whereas Ferreiro and Teberosky’s theoretical paradigm (1985) was used for reflecting on the process of writing acquisition. This study was carried out with third and fifth graders who attend a public city school in Pelotas, RS, Brazil. Data were collected by means of four instruments: (a) Textual production workshop; (b) Test of sensitivity to the prosodic accent; (c) Picture dictation; and (d) Writing contrastive minimal pairs. They made it feasible to collect different types of data, i. e., data on spontaneous writing, controlled writing, perception of the prosodic accent and on thoughts about the graphic accent. Children’s statements on their thoughts were collected by interviews guided by the Piagetian clinic method (CARRAHER, 1989). The high number of omissions of the diacritic in data on written production, along with answers collected by the interviews, led to the following conclusions: (a) children who took part in the research paid little attention to the use of the graphic accent; and (b) spelling of the diacritic is mostly motivated by information from the orthographic lexicon, i. e., the information value of the accent in Brazilian Portuguese – to mark prosodic anti-tendencies – is not taken into account. Data analysis showed that the children’s main hypothesis on the function of the accent is related to timbre markedness, rather than tonicity. Children’s justifications for the need to use the accent showed that they believe the graphic accent is needed on words whose tonic vowels admit timbre variation, but that it is unnecessary on words whose tonic vowels do not have a variable timbre. The study also showed that children believed that the quality of the vowel can influence the perception of the accent; thus, the higher the vowel, the harder it is to perceive the accent. Besides, children were found to have better perception of prosodic similarities than of differences. The study revealed children’s sensitivity to the duration of tonic vowels, mainly of the low vowel /a/, and some difficulty in identifying the tonic syllable in the word. Even though they are not generalizable, findings show that data on children’s writing and hypotheses on the graphic accent may guide teaching processes of this issue, so that teachers can plan and carry out adequate intervention which values children’s linguistic knowledge and relations they establish between graphic and phonic aspects of the language.