O papel da sílaba na aquisição da linguagem oral e escrita.

Recent studies of Brazilian Portuguese (henceforth, BP) suggest that vowels are the basis for the construction of syllables in writing (RODRIGUES, 2012) and in speech (HUNGRIA & ALBANO, 2016). The emergence of writing cannot be equated to that of speech, since the linguistic and cognitive repertoire of the preschooler is much greater than that of the baby. In this article, we revisit these studies to claim that the observed effects are socio-cognitive, in spite of their biological roots. We propose that the vowels constitute a scaffold for both age groups because they convey prosody, an indispensable component of child/adult interaction. Even at the beginning of babbling, the observed babies coordinated shared action with vocalization, thanks to some favorite vowels, accompanied by very few consonants, usually laryngeal. Besides variegating oral turns, prosody gives cohesion and meaning to a discourse built jointly with the caretakers. Similarly, the observed preschoolers could "write" and "read" short texts during joint narrative activities, even at a stage where their graphic repertoire was mostly vocalic. With simple statistics and audio transcription excerpts, we will show that immersion in a stimulating environment facilitates the construction of the syllable from its highest sonority constituents, a decisive step in children's path towards fluency - both oral and reading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]