A aquisição verbal e o processamento morfológico por crianças adquirindo o PB

Abstract

This work investigates the acknowledgement by children acquiring BP (Brazilian Portuguese) of the root as the part of the verb that has the permanent meaning, despite inflectional variations of affixes. Previous works suggest that children on an initial period of lexical acquisition treat words that have different phonological forms as completely different words (JUSCZYK; ASLIN, 1995; BORTFELD et al., 2005; SHI; LEPAGE, 2008; JUSCZYK; HOUSTON; NEWSOME, 1999). In this sense, morphology could represent trouble to lexical acquisition, as morphological processes (derivation and, mainly, inflection) create phonologically different words, but these words are related in meaning. We assume, as theoretical foundation, the proposal of conciliation (CORRÊA, 2006; 2009a; 2011) between a linguistic theory of the Minimalist Program (CHOMSKY, 1995 and latter works) and the psycholinguistic processing model aimed at language acquisition of Phonological Bootstrapping (MORGAN; DEMUTH, 1996; CHRISTOPHE et al., 1997) with the purpose to characterize the passage from a phonological and distributional analysis of the input to the syntactic treatment of linguistic statement. We also consider the Syntactic Bootstrapping hypothesis, which defends that syntactic structure guides the mapping of sentences’ meaning. We seek thus to verify in which age children acquiring BP map variations of the same verb as having the same base concept. We assume the hypothesis that is by recognizing recurrent verbal affixes on the language that is being acquired that child proceeds to the verbal internal segmentation between root and affixes, assigning the permanent concept to the root. The results we obtained with Picture Identification Tasks suggest three-year-old children tend to map an action into a novel verb, although memory seems to limit this mapping. Children of this age group appear to be uncertain about the meaning of the new verb’s variations. The methodological techniques of Picture Identification Task and Act Out provide robust data that four-year-old children map an action into a novel verb and treat variations of this novel verb as having the same base meaning. Besides, an experimental activity with Split-Screen Preferential Looking Paradigm, a finer technique, points out to the mapping of an action into a novel verb and the treatment of the verbal variations as having the same base concept by younger children, a two-year-old range group. According to the theoretical approach assumed in this work, our results point out to the treatment of a non-word as a verb due to distributional cues. The results can also be interpreted as evidence of the verbal internal segmentation and the consequent acknowledgement of the verbal root as the part of the word that has the base meaning, acquired by observational cues.