Aquisição de orações relativas livres de objeto no português brasileiro: a influência do elemento interveniente na compreensão

Abstract

This research focuses on the acquisition of relative structures. Literature on language acquisition and development shows that subject relative clauses (SR) are better comprehended than object relative clauses (OR) by both children and adults without any linguistic and/or cognitive impairment (VILLIERS; TAGER-FLUSBERG; HAKUTA; COHEN, 1979; GOODLUCK; TAVAKOLIAN, 1982; LABELLE, 1990; UTZERI, 2007; WANNER; MARATSOS, 1978; GIBSON; DESMET; GRODNER; WATSON; KARA, 2005). The greatest difficulty with object relatives has been assigned to the presence of an intervening element in these structures (GRILLO, 2005, 2008; COSTA ET AL., 2012; FRIEDMANN; BELLETTI; RIZZI, 2009). Our aim is to present and to discuss these hypotheses regarding the comprehension of headed object relatives (with an explicit antecedent) and free object relatives (without an explicit antecedent) by means of two experimental activities (picture selection tasks) with Brazilian Portuguese (BP) speaking-children from 4 to 6 years old manipulating different types of intervening elements. According to the literature, it is expected that full DPs as intervening elements would mostly impact headed relatives, while pronominal DPs as intervening subjects would be facilitators. In contrast, full DPs as intervening elements would be facilitators for free relatives. These structures have not been fully explored in literature though. So, data from free relatives with pronominal intervening subjects are explored. It is predicted that this configuration would be as hard as headed relatives with full DPs for young children. Additionally, the whole bunch of features shared by the moved element and the intervening element are considered, aiming at predicting possible levels of complexity for the parsing of each type of relative clause. Two experiments are presented: the first presents headed object relative clauses or free relative ones, with full DPs as intervening elements or a null 3rd person plural pronoun. It is believed that the use of null 3rd person plural pronouns, uncommon in BP, has increased the difficulty of the picture selection task, since the images showed explicit referents. The second experiment replaced the null 3rd person plural pronouns with overt pronominal subjects and presented results indicating broadly that young children find free relatives with pronominal subjects to be harder than free relatives with full DP subjects, but not as hard as headed relative clauses with full DP subjects. These results suggest that it is not only sharing a categorial feature that makes one type of relative harder than other types. The whole bunch of features shared by the moved element and the intervening element are computed, which may impose different costs for the parsing of relative clauses