Clues of children’s phonological knowledge restructuring in repair data found in their early writing development

Abstract

In this paper, we have analyzed repair data found in the spontaneous writing of children in their early literacy so that relations could be established with Phonology. Repairs made by children in their early writings, mainly the ones regarding the spelling of post-vocalic nasals and non-conventional segmentations, were used as support for the analysis of restructuring processes of children’s phonological knowledge. The theoretical basis for data analysis was Karmiloff-Smith’s Representational Redescription Model (RRM) (1986, 1994). Results of our analysis enable us to state that the contact with alphabetic writing favors the restructuring of phonological representations: in the case of nasals, from a monophonemic structure to a biphonemic one and, in the case of the notion of word, from a conception in which the clitic is perceived as a pretonic syllable to one that encompasses both the ideas of phonological word and clitic group.