Investigating Childish Language Processing Skills: The Acquisition of Mass/Countable Distinction in Brazilian Portuguese

Abstract

This study investigates the role of syntactic and semantic information present in the linguistic input in the acquisition of the distinction between count and mass nouns in Brazilian Portuguese (BP), specially the information expressed by grammatical number. It is assumed that, for the recognition of the distinction mass / count in PB, the grammatical number morphologic manifestation expressed in the elements of the Determiner Phrase (DP) is crucial. It can be assumed the hypothesis that the child is able to sense the presence / absence of number morpheme, and she takes this opposition as an indicator of mass or count noun. Moreover, the presence of bare nouns in argument positions in PB makes the input ambiguous with regard to mass and count nouns. This situation constitutes a problem for the child who acquires the PB. In this case, it is assumed the hypothesis that the child uses no morphological information, but semantic (contextual), the DP’s interpretation of ambiguous. The objectives of this study are a) whether the child takes the presence of the morpheme as indicative of the count noun reading, and b) to see how the child proceeds to the interpretation of ambiguous DP’s. Using the Picture Identification Task methodological paradigm, two groups of children (in a range of average age 36 months, and another in the range of 60 months) and a group of adults was tested. The results supports the idea that both morphosyntactic and semantic-contextual information are relevant in the acquisition of mass and count nouns in PB.