Aspectos relevantes do possessivo no processo de aquisição do português brasileiro

Abstract

This thesis investigates relevant aspects of the acquisition of the possessive pronounsby Brazilian children in a psycholinguistic view of language acquisition. According to Minimalism Program (Chomsky, 1995 and subsequent works) an innate Universal Gram-mar (UG) corresponding to the initial state of language acquisition and the conception of I-language (internal) - that consists of a lexicon and a computational system – are assumed. We also assume Phonological Bootstrapping Model (Morgan & Demuth, 1996; Christophe et al., 1997), that explains how children acquire the lexicon using perceptual abilities to segment the input data into linguistic units, and Syntactic Bootstrapping Model (Gleitman, 1990; 1994). According to this model, children use information from syntactic structure to deduce the meaning of the words. We hypothesized that children acquiring BP identify the possessive pronouns through perceptual analysis of speech and, once they are available in the lexicon, the computational system operates on their formal features correlating them into a hierarchical structure as a linguistic expression. The possessives are identified in the phonologi-cal interface by a statistical analysis of speech and the semantic features are acquired via pro-cessing in the semantic interface. Despite the possessive behavior being considered complex, this pronouns appear before other functional items in children early production. Because pos-sessive pronoun semantic value changes according to its position in a sentence, we propose a categorical division of it into two types: functional and semi-functional items. Three experi-ments were conducted in order to verify phonological, semantic and syntactic aspects of pos-sessive pronouns learning. The results suggest that children at 11 months are sensitive to their phonetic forms, at 3 ½ years are sensitive to their semantic possession features as well as to their syntactic position in DP.