A delimitação do adjetivo como categoria lexical na aquisição da linguagem: um estudo experimental no Português Brasileiro.

This paper focuses on the delimitation of adjectives as a lexical category by children acquiring Brazilian Portuguese. It reconciles a psycholinguistic approach to language acquisition with a minimalist conception of language (Chomsky, 1995-2001). The results of the experiments reported here are compatible with the working hypothesis, namely, that children make use of syntactic and morphological information in the delimitation of adjectives as a lexical category. They also reveal that the semantic properties of derivation affixes forming adjectives are already available by the age of two. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]