A emergência de prefixos na produção de crianças durante a aquisição de Português brasileiro

• Ano de defesa: 2020
• Autor(a) principal: Assine, Julia Svazati [UNIFESP]
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: por
• Instituição de defesa: Universidade Federal de São Paulo (UNIFESP)
• Palavras-chave em Português: Morphology; Prefixes; Acquisition; Brazilian Portuguese; Morfologia; Prefixos; Aquisição; Português Brasileiro
• Link de acesso: https://sucupira.capes.gov.br/sucupira/public/consultas/coleta/trabalhoConclusao/viewTrabalhoConclusao.jsf?popup=true&id_trabalho=10809825; https://hdl.handle.net/11600/64877

This paper presents a study on the emergence of prefixes a-, eN- and deS- in the speech of Brazilian Portuguese speakers children. The prefixes under study were selected based on representativeness in children's speech. The data searches were performed using the AntConc program within two corpora. Corpus A contains 160 transcriptions of spontaneous productions and covers the age range of 3 to 5 years old; corpus B has 101 transcriptions of elicited productions and covers the age range of 5 to 9 years old. After searching, we found 618 tokens in children’s speech of Corpus A, and 1547 tokens in adult’s speech. In children’s speech of corpus B, we found 186 tokens. The data found were classified according to the following characteristics: semantic compositionality, semantic contribution and prefixes’ position in relation to the root. In general, based on the assumptions of Distributed Morphology, the prefixes a- and eN- are considered as inner prefixes and the prefix deS- is considered as an outer prefix. Our specific purposes are as follows: a) to examine the emergence of prefixes in children’s speech considering the characteristics mentioned above; b) to verify, in corpus A data, if the child produces, for each compositional form with prefix, the same form without the prefix, as an indication that he/she is in fact analyzing the word; c) to compare, in corpus A, the emergence of forms with prefix in children's speech with the frequency received by the input; d) to observe what type of production, present in the adult’s speech, lacks in the child’s speech; e) to compare the data from corpus A with the data from corpus B in order to observe the possible differences between the forms produced by younger and older children; and f) based on the findings, to discuss to what extent the distinction between inner and outer morphology is relevant in child’s speech. The data analysis led us to the following conclusions: a) in general, the first prefix to appear is the prefix a-; it appears in very frequent forms without semantic compositionality; b) 53% of the forms with semantic compositionality have a previous presence of the equivalent form without the prefix; it means that these 53% are possibly analyzable; c) most forms that appear in the first age group are frequent or very frequent in the adult’s speech. In the following age groups, the presence of infrequent forms increases; d) most of the forms that are lacking in children’s speech are those with low frequency in the input; e) the characteristics present in the older children‘s data do not show greater complexity compared to the younger children’s output; and, lastly, f) the distinction between inner and outer morphology is relevant in child’s speech as the former is more expressive in the early age groups and the latter appears in greater numbers with advancing age.