A sensibilidade aos determinantes e a segmentação do DP por bebês brasileiros

Abstract

This study aims at investigating the sensitivity to phonetic form of determiners and analyzing whether this sensitivity would help 13-month-old Brazilian babies to segment the Determiner Phrase (DP) into smaller unities (determiner + noun). The theoretical approach adopted seeks at conciliating a psycholinguistic treatment for the language acquisition with a linguistic theory, through the integration between Phonological Bootstrapping (MORGAN and DEMUTH, 1996; CHRISTOPHE et al., 1997) and the Minimalist Program, in relation, especially, to its conception of Language Faculty (HAUSER, CHOMSKY & FITCH, 2002), seen through two perspectives: in its narrow sense (FLN) and in its broad sense (FLB). This conciliation allows us to explain how the child reaches the language syntax from distributional and prosodic cues available at the phonic interface. Studies conducted in different languages, including Brazilian Portuguese (Name,2002) suggest that, around the age of 10 months, children would already be able of recognizing function words in the speech stream, from their acoustic and distributional characteristics, using them as cues for syntactic and lexical access. The hypothesis are that (i) at 13 months, the child is sensitive to the phonic form of determiners, distinguishing the real determiners from the nonsense determiners, being able of (ii) segment the DP consisting of a real determiner + a nonsense noun. Our results suggest that, at 13 month-old, babies are sensible to the phonic form of their language determiners, reacting differently when they are presented either to the determiners (o / um / este/ aquele) or the nonsense determiners (ône / ór / ugi / ófupi).It also suggests that the children were able of segmenting the DP into smaller unities, since they reacted differently to the familiarized nonsense nouns when they were preceded by a real determiner or a nonsense determiner.