Desenvolvimento morfossintático em crianças com quatro anos de idade (4;00 - 4;05)

Abstract

The morphosyntax is one of the areas of language which studies the organization of words in the sentence as well as the internal structure of each word. In terms of development studies, there are few benchmarks for European Portuguese, which was developed by this project, which involves the analysis of spontaneous speech of children aged 4 years . The main objective is the morphosyntactic characterization of the speech of children within the age group of 4 , 00-4 ; 05 years of age . Another aim is to verify whether the gender of the children and the parents' education influences the results. The speeches analyzed previously belonged to a linguistic corpus collected, the sample used in this dissertation 29 children. The speech of children was transcribed for ELAN (EUDICO Linguistic Annotator; www.lat-mpi.eu/tools/elan) program and subsequently analyzed. The results revealed that children within this age group already have a speech using all parts of speech, with a preference for the use of verbs, with no difference between the discourses of children were female and male gender. It is the verbal agreement that more errors occur, and more precisely in relation to the verb conjugation in person. This investigation was concluded that children of age group studied have a discourse with morphosyntactic features already quite close to the speech of adults , with only a few still more complex and late acquisition features that are still in the stabilization phase .

Date of Award	2014
Original language	Portuguese
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Ana Mineiro (Supervisor) & Maria Emília Santos (Co-Supervisor)