A compreensão de unidades fraseológicas por crianças de 4 a 7 anos

Abstract

The main objective of this research is analyzing children’s understanding of figurative meaning sentences as ser dedo duro and tirar o cavalinho da chuva, investigating when and how children come to understand them. These expressions are non-compositional, that is, they cannot be understood by the sum of its constituent elements, but only by access to the metaphorical meaning. In agreement with Monteiro-Plantin (2012), they are denominated in this thesis as phraseological units (Ufs). The phraseological units are part of the cultural universe shared by the speakers of a given language and can represent a difficult task for the children, which are commonly seen as speakers with difficulties to understand the figurative meaning that tend to literality. However, even young children in early school life already have a considerable linguistic experience, even if limited, from their bodily experiences, interaction with experienced speakers and access to cultural products intended for them (books, Internet videos, music, cartoons, etc). This research proposes to analyze the understanding that children in this age group have of the phraseological units, scrutinizing the factors that influence this understanding, as well as the tactics and strategies adopted by these subjects in the process and based on the obtained data, to elaborate a phraseological processing model of children from 4 to 7 years of age. This is an experimental research of a quantitative-qualitative nature, using an interface between the fields of Phraseology, Experimental Psycholinguistics and Cognitive Linguistics anchored in the works of Gibbs (1980,1987), Castillo Carballo (2002), Lakoff and Johnson (2003), Monteiro-Plantin (2012) and Ortiz-Alvarez (2015) and in the experiments conducted by Irujo (1986), Levorato and Cacciari (1999), Crespo and Cáceres (2006) and Mini, Diakogiorgi and Fotopoulou (2011), Caillies e Le Sourn-Bissaoui (2006) and Siqueira et al (2017). The subjects are forty children of both sexes divided into two groups: 4-5 years and 6- 7 years, all students from public and private schools in the city of Juazeiro do Norte-Ceará, and ten university students as a control group. The data were analyzed through the SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Sciences) computer program and had a quantitative and qualitative treatment. The results indicate that the subjects have an intermediate level of phraseological comprehension, that semantic analysability has a special influence on younger children and that the types of Ufs most easily understood by children aged 4 to 7 are the somatisms and gastronomisms. Based on the collected data, we conclude that while 4-5 year-olds prioritize tactics focused on lexical access, 6-7 year olds prefer to make use of strategies related to contextual information.