From sensitivity to awareness: morphological knowledge and the Representational Redescription model

Abstract

The present investigation is dedicated to the study of the Brazilian Portuguese children’s morphological knowledge and its relation with levels of mental representations as postulated by the Representational Redescription model (KARMILOFF-SMITH, 1992). The data consist of regularized verbal forms, changes of inflectional suffixes as well as lexical novelty (morphological variant forms) taken from spontaneous speech and of three morphological tests, which involve derivation and inflection of nonce words, extraction of nonce base from derived nonce words, and judgment of words as well as a metalinguistic explanation. The survey of the responses reveals morphological knowledge that goes from sensitivity – morphological variant forms – to linguistic awareness – morphology tests. Thus, the data pointed to the plausibility of all the different levels of representation across development. In our view, this work embodies a first step towards an explanation of the mental representations that underlie both the comprehension and production of children’s growing morphological knowledge and goes beyond the simple implicit/explicit dichotomy used in most previous work.