Abstract

SOUZA, André Luiz Elias de  and  CARDOSO-MARTINS, Cláudia. The acquisition of regular verb morphology in brazilian portuguese: a cognitive linguistics approach. Psicol. Reflex. Crit. [online]. 2010, vol.23, n.1, pp. 131-140. ISSN 0102-7972.  http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/S0102-79722010000100016.

In recent years, there has been an increasing body of research on Cognitive Linguistics in Brazil. However, few studies have investigated first language acquisition from a Cognitive Linguistics viewpoint. The present study is an attempt to fill in this gap. The productivity of a young Brazilian Portuguese-speaking boy with regard to the use of regular verbs was investigated at two different times: when he was 1 year and 10 months old, and when he was 2 years and 2 months old. The data were taken from the CHILDES database. Although there was a significant progress between Times 1 and 2, results suggest that the knowledge of the morphosyntax of verbs develops gradually, being initially non-schematic, which is consistent with the Cognitive Linguistics framework. The implications of these results for a theory of language acquisition are discussed.

Keywords : Cognitive linguistics; Verb morphology; Language acquisition.