Bibliographic survey of studies on language acquisition in Brazilian linguistic journals

a focus on morphology

Abstract

this paper presents a systematic survey of publications and proposes a qualitative discussion on the scientific production of studies in Morphology Acquisition in comparison to other levels of linguistic analysis within the field of Language Acquisition and Development in Brazil. The results show that in the last 30 years there have been fewer studies on morphological phenomena during first language acquisition than studies on the acquisition of phonological, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic aspects in the selected corpus. The greatest interest of research on Brazilian Portuguese is in the acquisition of the verbal system and addresses the phenomenon of regularization and the existence of variant morphological forms in the acquisition of morphophonological rules. Then, the development of the nominal system arouses interest, with the investigation of the variable number agreement, with control of the occurrence of redundant and non-redundant agreement, followed by the acquisition of the gender category with special interest in the variation promoted by the morphemic exchanges carried out by the kids. Among the little representative studies on derivational morphology, there are few studies that carry out an investigation in relation to research questions defined in a specific theoretical framework. Studies on the survey of affix occurrences and the investigation of children’s morphological awareness are more present. Finally, a research agenda is drawn up for studies on the acquisition of morphological and lexical aspects and it is emphasized that the study of such empirical issues is only justified insofar as it appears behind a language model for morphology and for the lexicon.