Lexical and syntactic clues to the delimitation of adjectives in the acquisition of Brazilian Portuguese

Abstract

This paper presents an experimental study of the delimitation of adjectives as a lexical category in the acquisition of Brazilian Portuguese. It reconciles a psycholinguistic approach to language acquisition with a minimalist conception of language (CHOMSKY, 1995-2001). According to the phonological bootstrapping hypothesis (MORGAN & DEMUTH, 1996; CHRISTOPHE et al., 1997), it is assumed that infants are sensitive to closed class elements (as determiners and affixes) in the processing of the phonetic interface. According to the syntactic bootstrapping hypothesis (GLEITMAN, 1990), it is assumed that the parsing of adjectives in DP and small clause contexts, together with the assumption that DPs refer to objects/entities, allow the representation of the adjectives as words that present a property or an attribute of a given referent. And the role of the canonical word order in the distinction between nouns and adjectives is evaluated. Two experiments are presented: both of them were conducted with children, making use of the object selection with pseudo-words paradigm. The first experiment was conducted with 18-22 month old children, and the second one, with 2-3 and 4-5 year olds. The results of the experiments reported here are compatible with the hypothesis that children make use of syntactic and morphological information in the delimitation of adjectives as a lexical category. They also reveal that the semantic properties of derivation affixes forming adjectives are already available by the age of two.