Characteristics of fricatives consonants orthography in Brazilian children

Abstract

Purpose (1) describe children’s orthographic performance in the record of fricative consonants in a position of simple syllabic attack; (2) verify the influence of the accent in errors occurrence; and (3) categorize the kind of errors found. Methods Fifteen children’s text productions were selected, they attended the First grade of Primary School in 2001, referred to 14 thematic proposals. From these productions, all the words with occurrence of fricative consonants in syllabic position of simple attack were selected. These occurrences were distributed in hits and errors, these were, then, organized according to the appearance in pre-tonic, tonic and post-tonic syllables, unstressed monosyllables and tonic monosyllables. Results It was noted that (1) a predominance of hits compared to the errors; (2) the non-relevance of the accent in the record of unconventional fricatives; (3) higher occurrence of phonological substitutions, followed by the orthographical ones and, finally, in lower number, omissions; (40 predominance of errors inside the fricative phonological class. Conclusion The group of children studied, even in the beginning of literacy, already shows very stable in the record of graphemes that is sent to the fricative phonemes. At last, it was observed that the errors seems to be motivated, mainly, by the difficulty of these children with the spelling of PB.