The (ortho)graphic errors of palatal sonorants

Abstract

This article describes and analyzes (ortho)graphic errors of the palatal sonorants /ʎ, ɲ/, consonants represented by <lh> and <nh> in the writing system. Palatal sonorants make up a natural class that has aroused interest in diachronic and synchronic studies, as well as in language acquisition, both in speech and writing. The database for this study is a set of errors extracted from texts produced by children in the first four grades of elementary school in two schools, one public and the other private. The analyzes carried out adopt a linguistic perspective and dialogue with studies of phonological development, with the support of autosegmental phonology (Clements and Hume, 1995), and the writing acquisition (Miranda, 2012, 2014). The errors were analyzed based on the categories proposed by Miranda (2020), which aim to identify the nature of the errors found in the initial alphabetic writings, namely: phonological, orthographic or phonographic. The results found show a greater effect of the phonology of the consonants by processes that are similar to those observed in speech acquisition. Cases were also observed in which the motivation was of a phonographic nature as a result of the difficulty in establishing graphophonic relationships related to the complexity of the digraphs with H.