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In the literature about European Portuguese (EP) it is discussed the phonological nature of the two rhotic consonants /ʀ/ and /ɾ/, contrastive only in intervocalic position (Barbosa, 1983; Mateus & Andrade, 2000; Amorim & Veloso, 2018). The rhotic /ʀ/ in EP has a wide free variation: [ʀ, ʁ, χ, x, r] (Jesus & Shadle, 2005; Rennicke & Martins, 2012; Rodrigues 2015). Data from typical acquisition in EP has shown that /ʀ/ is acquired before /ɾ/ in simple onsets (Mendes et al., 2009/13; Costa, 2010; Amorim, 2014), with obstruent allophones reported for /ʀ/. In this paper, we will analyze data from two samples: (i) a sample of 87 children with an age range of 2;11 to 6;06 years old, from the Lisbon district, monolingual in EP, without linguistic development disorders (Ramalho, 2017); (ii) a sample of 9 children with primary phonological disorder, with an age range from 3;0 to 7;6, from the Évora district. The data were collected with the application of the CLCP-PE instrument and were analyzed with PHON (Hedlund & Rose, 2019). All phonetic occurrences of /ʀ/ were considered, and then compared with realization of the targets /ɾ/, /l/ e / ʎ /, always in simple onset. In the typical development sample, the rates for /ʀ, ɾ/ were above 80% which means the acquisition of both segments at 3;00. On the other hand, in the atypical development sample, /ʀ, ɾ/ have distinctive behaviors: /ʀ/ has success rates above 50% and /ɾ/ below 50%. In both samples the more frequent phonetic variants are [ʁ, χ, x, ʀ], which shows an approximation to the obstruent class. Our data constitute a contribution to the phonological status of /ʀ/ in EP, supporting the hypothesis of the existence of two rhotic phonemes in EP (cf. Miranda, 1996; Bonet & Mascaró, 1997). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on the phonological profile of Portuguese children diagnosed with phonological disorders is scarce. In this paper, we intend to contribute with empirical data on the acquisition of place of articulation in sibilants (coronal [± anterior]) by using the speech production of seven Portuguese children with phonological disorders (diagnosed with speech sounds disorders or with specific language impairment). The assessment test CLCP-PE was used to collect the data; the software PHON assisted the phonetic transcription and the data analysis tasks. Results showed preferential patterns, thus predicting specific orders of acquisition in the setting of the focused contrasts: (i) place of articulation: [-sonorant; - continuant; coronal [±anterior]] >> [-sonorant; +continuant; coronal [±anterior]] >> [+sonorant; +continuant; coronal [±anterior]]); (ii) voicing: [-voiced] >> [+voiced]); (iii) syllable constituency: Onset >> Coda (a preference for [s] for target Coda fricatives was observed). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]