A contribuição de propriedades prosódicas da fala dirigida à criança brasileira para a aquisição do adjetivo no PB

Abstract

This thesis investigates the role of prosodic properties of infant directed speech (IDS) for the acquisition of adjectives in Brazilian Portuguese (BP). In BP, adjectives constitute a category that does not present fixed morphological mark or syntactic position. Besides, adjectives and nouns share mopho-phonological morphemes, and either one can follow DET- in the DP. This study aims at investigating the role of prosodic cues of ADJ(ective) in Brazilian IDS for distinguishing lexical elements of ADJ(adjectivs) and N(ouns) and for the process of language acquisition. The generative language model proposed by Chomsky (1995, and subsequent works), Minimalism Program is assumed. We also assume the Prosodic/Phonological Bootstrapping Hypothesis (MORGAN & DEMUTH, 1996; CHRISTOPHE et al., 1997) that explains how children acquire their lexicon exploring perceptual abilities. Our specific objectives are: (i) characterize prosodic properties of N and ADJ in the DP, in a mother-child interactive situation; (ii) investigate infants sensitivity to prosodic cues of Brazilian IDS, related to the position of ADJ in the DP; (iii) verify the role of prosodic properties of the adjective in BP for the mapping of pseudo words to object properties by 2- and 3- year-old children. In the first experiment, we observed that ADJ is accented, in comparison to N, when IDS was produced in a semi-spontaneous environment. In the second experiment, infants were sensitive to prosodic distinctions in DPs, in which the position of ADJ was manipulated. In the third experiment, 2- and 3- year-old used prosodic cues of ADJ to map novel words to properties. Our results are compatible with the hypothesis that prosodic cues are reliable sources of information for the distinction of the lexical elements of N and ADJ in Brazilian IDS and indicate that prosodic cues might be relevant for the acquisition of ADJ and for the bootstrapping of the process of lexical acquisition by Brazilian children.