Aquisição de língua estrangeira: o desenvolvimento dos níveis linguísticos de fonologia, morfossintaxe e prosódia em crianças

Abstract

Foreign language acquisition in childhood is a multifaceted process that involves the development of different linguistic levels in interaction with maturational, cognitive, and exposure-related factors. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate the development of different linguistic levels in Brazilian children who are learning English as a foreign language. Based on the language development model proposed by Skeide and Friederici (2016), this research seeks to understand how children in the process of linguistic development acquire the phonological, morphosyntactic, and prosodic levels in English, considering their prior knowledge of Brazilian Portuguese as their mother tongue. The experimental component of the study involved the creation of three psycholinguistic experiments designed to assess linguistic development at the phonological, morphosyntactic, and prosodic levels. The research was conducted at a private language school in the city of João Pessoa, Paraíba, Brazil (Cultura Inglesa Manaíra), and the participants were children enrolled at the school aged 6, 7, and 8 years, with exposure to English for 6, 12, 18, and 24 months. The presentation of the experiments and the participants’ responses were administered through Google Forms. In the phonological experiment, participants were exposed to audio recordings of words containing English phonemes that do not exist in Brazilian Portuguese (i.e., /˄, æ, ɵ, ð/). The task required participants to listen to three words and identify which one contained the previously presented phoneme. The morphosyntactic experiment addressed verbal inflectional regularity and word derivation using the suffixes –able and –ly. Participants were asked to listen to pairs of sentences containing correct and incorrect word forms and select the correct sentence. In the prosodic experiment, participants listened to sentences and selected the image that best corresponded to the sentence according to its prosody. The results indicated that children’s linguistic development partially follows the stages observed in first language acquisition, with differences associated with age and length of exposure to the foreign language. Age proved to be a determining factor at the phonological level, whereas length of exposure had a more significant influence on the morphosyntactic and prosodic levels. These findings suggest that, although foreign language acquisition follows some stages of the first language acquisition model, it is modulated by experiential factors and by transfer from the mother tongue. In addition to contributing to the understanding of linguistic processing in childhood foreign language acquisition contexts, this study offers relevant methodological contributions by proposing original experiments designed for a child population. Such instruments and results may serve as a basis for future research and for the improvement of pedagogical practices in foreign language teaching.