A sensibilidade de bebês brasileiros a fronteiras de sintagma entoacional: a prosódia nas fases iniciais da aquisição da linguagem

Abstract

The present study aims at investigating whether thirteen-month-old Brazilian infants are sensitive to prosodic properties that demarcate intonational phrase (I) boundaries in the Infant Directed Speech (IDS) and use them as cues for the continuous speech segmentation. We assume the integration between the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995 and later) and the Prosodic Bootstrapping Model (MORGAN & DEMUTH, 1996; CHRISTOPHE et al, 1997), in terms of Corrêa (2006). Given the possible relationship between prosodic and morphosyntactic constituents, our research is guided by the hypothesis that the acoustic information of prosodic boundaries facilitates speech segmentation by children acquiring language. We consider that there is a mapping between prosodic and morphological and syntactic units, although this relationship is not isomorphic (NESPOR & VOGEL, 1986; GOUT, CHRISTOPHE & MORGAN, 2004). Thus, we developed two experimental activities: Experiment 1 examined the acoustic information that delimit a I boundary in the IDS. Experiment 2 verified by the Visual Fixation Procedure whether Brazilian infants are able to perceive this information. The results suggest that these acoustical properties act as cues that help infants to segment the speech stream into grammatically meaningful units.