Del habla a la escritura. Estudio comparativo sobre la representación del fonema /-s/ en niños hispanohablantes mexicanos y rioplatenses

Abstract

In this paper we present a comparative study of the writing of the phoneme l-sl among Spanish speaking children from Mexico City and the region of Rio de la Plata. Comparing the dialect spoken in Mexico City with that of Rio de la Plata; we can see that in the latter this is pronounced with a clear aspiration and/or loss when placed at the end of a word. From this we could expect that the children from Rio de la Plata would show the same phenomenon in their writing as they do orally: omitting the final /-s/ whereas the Mexican children would write in the same manner they speak: pronouncing the final ‘s’. Instead the data show that in both groups there are very few omissions and that these do not correspond exclusively to phonic distinctions; but are also determined by grammatical; positional; semantic aspects as well as extra-textual considerations derived from empirical knowledge.