A aquisição das construções passivas em português e inglês : um estudo translingüístico.

Abstract

This doctoral thesis attempts to contribute to the understanding of the nature of language and mind by studying a single linguistic phenomenon, examined from several angles. This phenomenon is the passive construction, focus of considerable interest in psycholinguistic research in the last decades. Located in the field of language acquisition, this investigation aims to shed light on the following question: How do children learn the passive constructions? To do this, two techniques have been used: analysis of empirical data and computer simulation of neural processing. The empirical data comes from four studies, that differ from others mainly because of the following: 1 – Both comprehension and production of active and passive constructions were tested; 2 – The same techniques testing comprehension and production were used with English and Portuguese monolingual native speakers; 3 – Both children, aged 3 to 10, and adults were tested, constituting a sample of more than 300 subjects. The crosslinguistic results provided evidence for modelling the acquisition and processing of passive constructions in a computer neural network. A connectionist neural network was built, relying on the assumption that learning is based on associative processes involving modifiable synaptic weights and connections between networks of simple computing units. The research stresses the need for constant interchange between empirical data, neurological findings and computational techniques. Together, this information provides a comprehensive and valid strategy for investigating complex cognitive domains such as the acquisition of human language.