A identificação e o processamento da concordância de gênero entre elementos das categorias N e ADJ por crianças adquirindo o PB

Abstract

The present work investigates the identification and processing of gender agreement in Brazilian Portuguese (BP), considering the elements of categories N and ADJ, by children between 3 and 5 years old. As for the acquisition of the gender system, the child needs to identify: (i) that BP is a language that expresses grammatical gender morphosyntactically; (ii) its gender (feature) values; (iii) how gender agreement is manifested in Noun Phrase. Experimental studies have investigated which elements in Determiner Phrase may be used as morphophonological cues by children between 18 and 42 months, for identification and acquisition of elements that manifest gender agreement (between D and N; between D, N, and ADJ), in languages such as French, Canadian French, BP, Spanish and Czech (VAN HEUGTEN; CHRISTOPHE, 2015; VAN HEUGTEN; SHI, 2009; CORRÊA; NAME, 2003; LEW-WILLIAMS; FERNALD, 2007; SMÓLIK; BLÁHOVÁ, 2018 ). Other studies have explored how children, between 30 and 33 months, attribute gender to pseudonouns, in BP and in Spanish (CORRÊA; NAME, 2003; TREJO; ALVA, 2013). However, no research was found focusing on the identification and processing of morphosyntactic relationship of gender agreement within the scope of NP, i.e., between N and ADJ, in the absence of D, by children. Since, in BP, there are cues other than the determiner ones for the identification of agreement, the questions that guide this study consist of investigating: (i) the identification and processing of gender agreement in the NP domain by children between 3 and 5 years; (ii) and whether or not there are differences in the use of these different cues (either in the final vowel of the N or in the final vowel of the ADJ) by children, depending on their age. To investigate these issues, an elicited production experiment was conducted. Images of invented objects, identified by pseudonouns followed by adjectives (eg. Moca vermelha (red moca) vs. puco preto (black puco)) were presented to children in order to verify how they would assign gender to the unknown nouns (pseudonouns): if they would be guided by the pseudonoun final vowel or by the adjective gender-marked final vowel. The results show that children from 3 to 5 years- old preferred the final vowel information to assign gender to the pseudonouns, with no significant difference between masculine or feminine conditions. These results suggest that children aged 3 to 5 years acquiring BP already recognize the high pairing between the final vowel of nouns and grammatical gender in BP (SCHWINDT, 2018) and use this information to assign gender to new nouns. There was no significant effect for age factor. However, response rates indicated a difference in the use of the cue (the final vowel of the N or final vowel of the ADJ) for the identification of the gender by 3-year-old children, unlike older children (4 and 5 years). The analysis of response rates suggests that 3-year-old children also used the gender information conveyed by the gender morphophonological marking in the ADJ due to the N-ADJ agreement in the NP.