Prosody and writing: a longitudinal study of hyposegmentation in junior high school' texts

Abstract

This project aims to identify prosodic and morphosyntactic regularities in hyposegmentation of written words - as "puraqui" (por aqui), in which there is the unconventional absence of graphical boundary. The data was identified in texts produced by 89 students over the four last years of Junior High School. We assume that this kind of unconventional written word is an evidence of student's hypotheses about what (ortho)graphics word is. These hypotheses are anchored both in prosodic structures of the language (relate to prosodic constituents as word and clitic group) and in literate information (concerning to the blanks settings that could indicate what would be the written word for students). We seek to answer the following questions: I) What are the prosodic structures mobilized by the students of Junior High School when words are segmented? (II) What spelling difficulties can be identified through morphosyntactic information (grammatical and lexical words) of hyposegmented words? (III) What the unconventional segmentations reveal about student's hypothesis toward the spelling convention? (IV) What are the relations between orality and literacy that hyposegmentations data reveal? The answers to these questions will be given from theoretical discussion about the relationship between speech and writing, and between orality and literacy relevant to the work on the orthographic conventions of Portuguese.