Aquisição da linguagem e variação linguística: um estudo sobre a flexão verbal variável na aquisição do PB

Abstract

This research aims at investigating the production and the comprehension of 3rd person plural verbal inflection by children acquiring Brazilian Portuguese (BP). Sociolinguistic studies point out the variability on plural markings in BP, on noun and on verb phrases (NARO, 1981; SCHERRE, 1994; SCHERRE; NARO, 1992; 1993; 1998; 2000; 2006; NARO; SCHERRE, 1991; 1993; 1999; 2007). We discuss, from the language acquisition’s point of view, the production and the comprehension of number marking by children, considering that, depending on the linguistic variety children are exposed to, BP may present a non-consistent morphological number marking in the input. On a longitudinal study, third person plural verbal morphemes production was investigated on contexts of interaction between children and adults. The analysis of data shows that, although variability between redundant and non-redundant plural markings on verbs is frequent, the presence of plural verbal marking is more frequent on middle class adults and children’s speech. On the other side, working class children’s speech presents more non-redundant verbal markings. Previous studies in several languages that exhibit consistent number inflection patterns suggest that, although children produce number inflection by the age of three, they have difficulty on comprehension tasks until the age of six (JOHNSON; DE VILLIERS; SEYMOR, 2005; PÉREZ-LEROUX, 2005; LEGENDRE et al., 2010; BLÁHOVÁ; SMOLIK, 2014). Our experimental study aims at verifying the identification and the comprehension of 3rd person verbal forms (singular and plural) by Brazilian children in contexts in which number information is given by redundant markings (on subject and verb) and in contexts in which number information is presented only on the verb (null subject sentences). The results suggest the identification of plural markings and the mapping of plural sentences to pictures with more than one character and a development on the performance as a whole due to age range. Besides, social factors seem to influence participants’ performance. In general, variable input seems not to interfere on the identification and comprehension of the plural verbal morpheme on the task developed on this study since BP’s results are similar to the ones verified on languages in which verbal inflection is consistent.