Autosegmental phonology and early literacy: Multilinear model and geminates between emergent and conventional writing

Ruvoletto, S.

University of Paris 8

In the studies concerning early literacy, the researchers found out two principles that are adopted by
children, irrespective of their mother tongue, to judge if a sequence of characters can be read or not (Ferreiro, Teberowsky 1979). The theorical position suports on this study is based on the « internal variety principle » which say that children, before schooling, identify a written word as a sequence of characters which are different one to each others. This suppose they don't have a representation for double symbols. However in the Italian written system, duplication of consonant letters (called geminates) occurs very frequently (e.g. ?zz? in pizza). How could Italian children deal with them? Participants: 80 Italian children enrolled in kindergarten or first graduate were subdivided in 3 groups according to their age and scholarization. I classified their phonological competences by the CMF standardized test (Vicari, Trasciani & Marrotta, 2008) and their writing skills by the writing of 8 words. Methods: Children were tested one by one in a semi-structured interview through 3 tasks. 1) Phonetic segmentation with pictures 2) Phonetic segmentation with written words 3) Choice between minimal pairs with or without geminates. Results: Thanks to task 3, I showed that most of the Italian children between 4 and 5 years old don't accept words with geminates, according to the internal variability principle. Comparing the results of tasks 1 and 2, I can say that Italian children's phonology representation is organized in differnt tiers (syllabic structures and temporal units) which are developing in different moments of the language acquisition. The components of all the tiers are acquired during the phonological stage (4/5 years of age), whereas the integration of the information represented in the tiers of the temporal units takes place only when the learning of writing starts (6/7years of age).