"Uma flor tapoja e uma casa jufosa: o papel da nomeação e de propriedades morfofonológicas no processo de identificação de novos adjetivos por crianças brasileiras"

Abstract

This dissertation approaches the process of lexical acquisition for Brazilian children and it investigates, particularly, the relationship among conceptual category and linguistic category, and properties morphophonological of the adjective. The hypothesis that guides this dissertation is the one that the nomination of the objects and the presence of morphemes characteristic of adjectives are robust tracks used by the children in the process of acquisition of new adjectives. A perspective psycholinguistic of the acquisition of the language is adopted that intends the conciliation of a model of linguistic processing (models of Phonological and Syntactic Bootstrapping), with a language model proposed by the Generative Theory. The conciliation among the models seeks to explain, satisfactorily, the form for the which the child becomes capable of, once exposed to a natural language, to extract of the linguistic material to which is presented the elements that form the lexicon of your language. Two experimental activities were developed, being used the technique of object identification, with two three year-old children. The first evaluates the recognition of new adjectives, being compared the presentation of nominated objects (a tapoja flower) or with vague names (a tapoja thing). In the second experiment, they were increased to the pseudo-adjectives the suffixes -oso/a and -ado/a (a jufosa house) / a jufosa thing), in view of investigating the paper of the suffix together with the nomination of the objects as facilitators in the identification of the adjective for the child accompanied Adjectives of name (Exper. 1) they are more easily identified, but when added of suffix (Exper. 2) they are recognized even in the presence of vague names. The results are compatible with our hypothesis, because they suggest that the nomination and the mark morphophonological are robust tracks used by the children to identify new adjectives.