Consciência morfológica em crianças não alfabetizadas e em processo de alfabetização :produção e reconhecimento de morfemas

Abstract

The focus of this research was Morphological Awareness, which is the ability to reflect on the morphemes of the language. It was analyzed in data from illiterate children and from children in the literacy process on words whose structures carry, especially, the derivational suffixes -eiro, -ista, -or, the inflectional suffix of gender and the prefixes des- and re-. This study not only focused on the abilities of morpheme production and morpheme recognition but also applied tasks, divided into two main areas: four tasks aimed at morpheme production (Production Task of Lexical Family, Production Task of Words with Agentive Suffixes, Production Task of the Inflection Morpheme of Gender with Pseudo-words, Production Task of Prefixes) and four tasks aimed at morpheme recognition (Recognition Task of Base- Morpheme, Recognition Task of Agentive Suffixes, Recognition Task of the Inflection Morpheme of Gender, Recognition Task of Pseudo-words). Other affixes also became part of the analysis, such as the suffixes -inho and -ão, because of answers to open questions found in the proposed tasks. The corpus was obtained through interviews with 16 children, 8 males and 8 females, divided into two groups: Group 1 - illiterate children, aged 4 and 5 years old; Group 2 - children in the literacy process, aged 6 and 7 years old. Results show the older the children get and the more they advance in the literacy process, the more their Morphological Awareness increases, although it had already been found in the first age group that took part in the study. The children had greater success in morpheme recognition tasks than in production tasks and the data showed that the prefix awareness was more complex than the suffix awareness. Therefore, the acquisition of suffix derivation happens before the prefix one. The data also pointed out levels of markedness among suffixes and prefixes that were reviewed, as well as levels of Morphological Awareness; higher complexity was found in morpheme segmentation.