O uso do adjetivo por crianças no PB: a relação entre o foco prosódico e a interface sintaxe-semântica

Abstract

This study investigates the interference of prosody, more specifically of intonation, in syntactic-semantic processing of DPs by children acquiring Brazilian Portuguese (BP). We focus on the adjective before the noun, since this position restricts its semantic value and may have variation of prosodic focus (narrow or broad one). Therefore, it is a privileged position to investigate the prosody-syntax-semantics interface. The addressed issue is whether children in an advanced stage in the course of acquisition of BP use this prosodic information in syntactic-semantic processing of the adjective. It stands as a theoretical perspective the integration of the Minimalist Program (Chomsky, 1995, 1997 and later works), and phonological bootstrapping hypothesis (Morgan & Demuth, 1996; CHRISTOPHE et al., 1997), as proposed by Correa and Augusto (2009) under the for Integrated Online Computation Mixed Model. An experimental activity was developed using a variation of grammaticality judging task. The prosodic focus and semantic load in the pronominal adjective were manipulated, resulting in sentences that could be semantically congruent or not in this position and present, or not, prosodic emphasis (narrow or broad focus). The test sentences were spoken by a puppet and the child should evaluate positively or negatively its speech. The hypothesis is that the presence of narrow focus signals to the child the semantic incongruence of the adjective before the noun. On the other hand, in the non-emphatic prosodic focus (broad focus) the child would not recognize this inconsistency. The analysis of the data revealed a main effect of prosodic focus, a main effect of syntactic-semantic congruence, and an interaction between these factors. These results support the hypothesis that children use prosodic information in the syntacticsemantic processing of the full DP.