The Acquisition of CCV Branching Onsets in Brazilian Portuguese: Revisiting the Roles of Variation and Phonological Density

This study discusses the acquisition of CCV (Consonant1+Consonant2+Vowel) branching onsets in Brazilian Portuguese by casting light on the roles of linguistic variation and phonological density. Our goal is to better understand why CCV acquisition takes so long in BP since Brazilian children prove to be able to fully articulate the branching onsets by the age of 4;0. Yet, CCVs are variably replaced by CVs (/pɾeto/→[ˈpe.tʊ]) or have their liquid quality altered (/pɾeto/→[ˈple.tʊ], /bluza/→[ˈbɾu.zɐ]) until 5;0-6;0. We argue that this variability is tied to the process of unstressed CCV reduction found in adult speech, combined to the low phonological density (PD) between both CCV-CV and C/l/V-C/ɾ/V pairs (/pɾato/ ‘dishplate’, /pato/ ‘duck’; /blindar/ ‘to shield’, /bɾindar/ ‘to toast’), contrasted to the high PD of /l/V-/ɾ/V (/ɛla/ ‘she’, /ɛɾa/ ‘it was’). We used the Tolerance Principle (YANG, 2016) to model data from a corpora study and tested the predictions with a mispronunciation detection task. Results show higher mispronunciation perception in high PD contexts, revealing how the input patterns lead to the overgeneralization of CV as an optional realization of CCV and how PD impacts the early contrast of /l, ɾ/ in CV, but not in CCV.