The emergence of compound words in children's speech

Abstract

It is observed that despite an expressive number of studies on compound words in Portuguese, there is not much information regarding the emergence of these structures in children's speech, due to the low number of academic productions related to the acquisition of morphology in Portuguese. Considering this, on the basis of a rationalist approach to language acquisition, the present study intends to investigate when compound nouns start to appear in the speech of children who are acquiring Brazilian Portuguese. To this end, it will be necessary to analyze longitudinal recordings sessions of four children present in the Corpus Santos, from the "Analysis of phonetic and phonological systems" by the Laboratory of Studies in Language Acquisition at the University of São Paulo. Moreover, it aims to create a database with compound nouns - gathered in the Corpus Santos - present in children's speech and in an adult speech addressed to children (input). All the data collected from the recording sessions will be classified based on the terms presented by Villalva (2003). Towards the end of the research, based on the results that will be earned, is intended to contribute to the literature in the area, encouraging other researchers to develop more studies on the subject. (AU)