ABSTRACT:
Brazilian Portuguese exhibits a variable pattern of number agreement: redundant marks in all the related items, and, alternatively, non-redundant agreement, in which the plural mark is carried by the determiner or by the possessive being omitted in the remaining items. Phonic salience is a property related to the contrast between singular and plural forms of an item and had been raised as one of the relevant factors in agreement variation. In this paper the role of phonic salience is investigated by means of experimental methodology. We report the results of two elicited production experiments conducted with adult speakers - the first one, with real nouns, and second one with pseudo-nouns. The results are in line with the idea that the two rules of number agreement would be processed differently. Phonic salience, in turn, did not reveal a significant influence, contrary to the previous hypothesis. Nonetheless, syllable stress coincidence with the plural morpheme might be a cue for explaining the contrast between the two rules.
Keywords:
Phonic salience; Variable nominal agreement; Language processing; Linguistic variation
