Language acquisition and linguistic variation in dialogue: investigating the production and comprehension of verbal inflection of third-person plural in BP

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the production and the comprehension of third person plural verbal inflection by children acquiring Brazilian Portuguese (BP), considering that plural morphological markings are variable on this language. Production data point out that redundant and non-redundant markings are variable on the verb and that extralinguistic factors – such as socioeconomic class and region of residence – influence the verbal agreement. Experimental data suggest a mapping between grammatical plural markings and the concept of plurality. Besides, a development on children’s performance due to age range was verified.

Keywords

• Flexão verbal variável
• Produção linguística
• Compreensão.