The grapheme <x> and the digraph <ch>: a longitudinal study of children spelling performance from three dialects of Portuguese

Abstract

The possible preservation of the phonological distinction between the voiceless post- alveolar affricate /tS/ and the voiceless post-alveolar fricative /S/ - corresponding to the graphic forms <ch> and <x>, respectively - in only a few dialects in the north of the country could be motivating different behaviors from children speaking different regional varieties of Portuguese in their first years of schooling. Since this study has not yet been done, this paper intends to analyze the written productions of Portuguese children from three linguistic areas of Portugal, represented here by children from the cities of Lisbon, Porto, and Chaves, about the spellings <x> and <ch>, to understand whether there is any relationship between the preservation or non-preservation of this phonological distinction and the children’s orthographic performance. Thus, the written productions of students belonging to the three dialectal regions mentioned above will be analyzed based on data from the EFFE-On corpus (Rodrigues, Lourenço-Gomes, Alves, Janssen & Gomes 2015) with the phonological distinction between /tS/ and /S/ having been preserved in some and neutralized in others. Therefore, it will be possible to measure the impact that the students’ dialect can have on their orthographic performance, as well as perceive any differences in performance related to the grapheme <x> vs. the digraph <ch>. Two groups of children were created for the analysis: a group with typical and another with atypical phonological development children. The differences observed point to a need to deepen the discussion concerning the sound aspect of language in the classroom, beginning in the first years of schooling - especially during the literacy phase.