A relação entre os verbos factivos e epistêmicos na compreensão de tarefas de crenças falsas de 1ª ordem na aquisição do português brasileiro

Abstract

In this work, are investigated linguistic and cognitive demands on the performance of children from 3-4 and 5-6 years old acquiring of Brazilian Portuguese (PB) in standard tasks of first-order False Beliefs (FBs), verifying the relationship between the factives verbs and epistemics in the performance of these tasks. It share of the concept of Theory of Mind (ToM) understood as a field of study that it seeks to know the nature of the human being's ability to understand their own beliefs, for through of its own knowledge, to be able to predict their actions and those of others (ASTINGTON & GOPNIK, 1988, 1991; FELDMAN, 1992; WELLMAN, 1991). It assumes a perspective psycholinguistic language acquisition based on syntactic bootstrapping hypothesis (GLEITMAN, 1990), according to which the analysis of the syntactic structure of listed is significant source of information for the child to identify/building lexical meaning. It assume also a minimalist conception of language (CHOMSKY, 1995-2001), which it conceives the language faculty in in the narrow sense (which include the computer system) and in the broad sense (that including the first and the others systems that would act together in the derivation of sentences in a particular language). Objections to the proposed of de Villiers (2005 and 2007), according to which the syntax complementary is a prerequisite for the domain of ToM is established. They consider, finally, that recent studies about factividad, discussing the child's ability to attribute a feature to semantic differentiator sub classes of verbs of mental states (DIAS, 2012), recognizing those that manifest as factive and that manifest as epistemics. They prepared three pre-tests (based in SILVA, 2012), in order to verify: (i) if a child of 3-4 and 5-6 years old identify the meaning of factive verb "to know" and the epistemic verb "to think", associated with the truth value of a sentence, (ii) if these children recognize the meaning of the epistemic verb " to think" in contrast to factive verb "to know" in a situation where there is no event of FB, (iii) if these children understand the meaning of the verb "to think" (in the sense of "to find" and sense of "to think"). An experiment was developed by applying the classical task of FB of change of location, and a task of FB adapted (with 3 guiding questions, with the verbs "to let ", "to see" and "to know"), with purpose to investigate if the presence of orientation improves the performance of minor children in realization of those tasks, in the measure that these verbs take up important aspects connected with the observation of the scene and the recovery of memory information before to ask the question the target task. The activities were accomplished with two groups of 24 children aged 3-4 years (a group with orientation and a group without orientation), and a group of 24 children aged 5-6 years (with orientation). Manipulated variables were: sentence type (simple and complex); the type of wh- (in situ e moved); the type of task FB (with orientation and without orientation), besides the age group (3-4 years old and 5-6 years old). The hypothesis is that the presence of orientation questions, involving sub classes of verbs, including the factives, assists the performance of classic FB task. The activities were developed through the elicited production task. The results of this first experiment indicate that the presence of questions with verbs that guide reasoning of FBs contributes to the realization of this task type. Besides the experiment 1, was developed another experimental activity, in order to check if there is difference as to the type of verb found in the question of orientation, as a facilitating factor in the understanding of the task. Two new groups of 24 children aged 3-4 years have been tested, accomplishing only a question of orientation at a time (with the verb "to see", or with the verb "to know"). The statistical analysis of the data reveals a marginally significant difference in relation to the type of verb having highest number of hits in the group that accomplished the task of FB with orientation whose question contained the verb "to know". The proposed work brings a methodological contribution that can deepen the discussion about language interface/theory of mind in the process of acquisition of PB.