Word order comprehension by children acquiring BP
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21165/el.v46i2.1604Keywords:
first language acquisition, preferential looking, psycholinguisticsAbstract
This paper presents the results of a Preferential Looking experiment aimed to study young children's word order comprehension in Brazilian Portuguese (BP). The experiment consisted of showing children two simultaneous videos, with two participants performing a transitive action, and changing only their agent-patient roles in each video. An auditory stimulus narrates only one of the scenes. Our work hypothesis is that children would look longer to the scene that was described by the auditory stimulus, because they recognize the canonical positions of agent and patient in the sentences, and identify these positions in the presented scenes. The results, however, made us conclude that the semantic information is equally important to sentential comprehension in the age group being studied, at least for the present experiment.
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