Interference of the linguistic variant in the repair strategies used during the phonological acquisition process

To investigate and compare the use of repair strategies in the acquisition of /R/ in simple onset, produced by children with typical phonological acquisition.

Speech data containing the /R/ from 120 children with typical phonological acquisition (60 male and 60 female) from Santa Maria (RS) and Crissiumal (RS), Brazil, aged between 1 year and 6 months and 4 years were used. To analyze the repair strategies, the following dependent variables were considered: omission, semivocalization, and liquid substitution; as well as the following independent variables: gender, age, precedent and following context, grammatical class, tonicity, number of syllables, and position in the word. The VARBRUL program was used for statistical analysis.

The statistical program selected as significant for omission in Santa Maria the variables tonicity and gender, and in Crissiumal, tonicity and age. For semivocalization in Santa Maria, the program selected the variable gender, and in Crissiumal, tonicity. For lateral liquid substitution in Santa Maria the statistical program did not select any variable. However, in Crissiumal, the variables position in the word, gender, and age were selected.

It was possible to observe that the repair strategies can diverge according to the dialect being used. Hence, it is important to consider the dialectal variation to make the phonological therapy more effective.