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The acquisition path of [w]-final plurals in Brazilian Portuguese

Becker, M; Nevins, A; Sandalo, F; Rizzato, É; (2018) The acquisition path of [w]-final plurals in Brazilian Portuguese. Journal of Portuguese Linguistics , 17 (1) , Article 4. 10.5334/jpl.189. Green open access

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Abstract

The plural of Brazilian Portuguese [w]-final nouns includes an alternation with [j], but the change is partially blocked in monosyllables and following a tense vowel (Becker et al. 2017). In this paper, we present a nonce word study with 115 children ages 7-13 and 43 adults, all participants from the state of São Paulo, showing that blocking in monosyllables is acquired earlier than blocking by tense vowels. We claim that sensitivity to monosyllabicity and vowel tenseness are both due to universal phonological pressures, but the effect of vowel tenseness is learned more slowly because it is limited to the plural morphology in this language. Our results from nonce words are convergent with evidence from innovative plurals and loanword adaptation, showing the primacy of phonological factors over history, orthography, and lexical frequency when it comes to alternations and their acquisition.

Type: Article
Title: The acquisition path of [w]-final plurals in Brazilian Portuguese
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.5334/jpl.189
Publisher version: http://doi.org/10.5334/jpl.189
Language: English
Additional information: Copyright: © 2018 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/.
Keywords: Brazilian Portuguese; acquisition; plural morphology; gradual learning; wug test; monosyllables; lax vowels
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences > Linguistics
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10054066
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