A compreensão de verbos psicológicos por crianças falantes do português brasileiro com idade entre 3 e 8 anos

Abstract

Our research was developed from the perspective of language comprehension, considering that it is possible to reach certain results, in studies with young children, through sentence comprehension tasks. Thus, assuming a conception of language acquisition based on generative assumptions and considering the semantic bootstrapping propositions, this thesis investigated how children, in different stages of language acquisition, evidence the understanding of psychological verbs through the Visual World Paradigm. We start from the assumption that, among a set of lexical items available for the acquisition of children, psychological verbs are complex to the acquisition of language, considering their inherent characteristics, such as designating a state, a condition or a situation. Our understanding of the psychological verb was based on the conception presented by Cançado (1995), which defines the psychological verbs as predicates that denote an emotional state and that map, obligatorily, in its argumentative structure, an Experiencer argument. The purpose of this research was to investigate how children in the process of language acquisition comprehend the thematic grid of psychological verbs and, consequently, react to the argumental mapping of such verbs, more specifically, the thematic role of experiencer, and their alternation of syntactic position. To do so, we developed an experimental study, composed of three tasks, with the participation of 72 children, aged between 3 and 8 years old, and we used two experimental techniques: Intermodal Preference Looking Paradigm and Eye Tracking. The first experimental task was to analyze the cognitive cost in the processing of psychological verbs of feeling. The second task was to examine the understanding of the thematic roles in the subject and object syntactic positions of psychological verbs of the Fear, Frighten, Calm and Animate classes, and of action verbs. The third task was to analyze the comprehension of the verbs that they name the classes defined by Cançado (1995). The results revealed that, in fact, psychological verbs are more costly for cognitive processing performed by children from 3 to 8 years old, since all the verbs analyzed showed a higher processing cost than the action verbs. The data showed that the alternation of the syntactic position of Experiencer's thematic role is a relevant characteristic for the understanding of psychological verbs by children in the process of language acquisition. With respect to the understanding of thematic roles in the syntactic position of subject and object of psychological verbs, the data showed that the causative aspect present in the thematic role of the external argument, in the syntactic position of the subject, makes the understanding of the Experiencer, in syntactic object position, less accessible. Finally, the data revealed that, although the psychological verbs of the Frighten class are more recurrents in the Portuguese language, according to Cançado (1995), these, because they present the Experiencer in the syntactic object position, demand a higher processing cost for children with age between 3 and 6 years old. We conclude that, at the age of 3 years, the children evidenced to understand the psychological verbs, although these are still in the process of acquisition. In addition, we conclude that psychological verbs require a high processing cost for children aged 3 to 6 years.