Morphological variant forms in morphological acquisition: evidence of child sensitivity to language grammar

Abstract

The study of Language Acquisition requires an investigation that rests on interfaces. The interface between Language Acquisition and Morphology offers interesting ways to investigate the grammatical knowledge that children early acquires. The morphological regularization process, verified in Brazilian Portuguese verbal forms like “fazi,” “trazo,” “sabo,” or “ponhei,” and the inflectional suffix changes in forms like “mexei,” “suji,” or “usia,” make us consider children’s recognition capacity of language morphological resources and the emergence of such grammatical knowledge. Furthermore, through this interface we can think children’s capacity to deal with the productivity of new forms in language, from language input and children’s own knowledge. Through this perspective, we find that it is not appropriate to think of this sort of production as ‘errors.’ In the study “Formas Morfológicas Variantes na gramática infantil: um estudo à luz da Teoria da Otimidade” (Lorandi, 2007) we searched for linguistics evidences of child sensibility to language’s morphological resources from morphological regularization data and, in the Optimality Theory framework, explanations of why this phenomenon occurs in child language. Our present work brings the results of this investigation, and gives support to a new terminology for these productions, ‘morphological variant forms,’ instead of ‘errors.’ It also develops on the use of this information on the understanding of human capacity to deal with the resources that language disposes and that are available during child language acquisition.