Aquisição de Exaustividade em Crianças Falantes de Português Europeu

Abstract

This study’s main objective is to see how children native speakers of European Portuguese acquire exhaustivity. This study compiles results previously obtained in Vaz (2010a, b) with a new study for universal quantification structures. For each test, 60 children were tested divided in three age groups (3, 4 and 5 years) and 20 adults as the control group. The results indicated that there is a significant difference between 4 and 5 year olds and that exhaustivity is associated with syntactic structure, even though it interacts with pragmatic factors. We concluded that exhaustivity is acquired at a different rate across structures (simple wh-questions > universal quantification > clefts > multiple whquestions), which we attribute to the varying complexity each display. Our results are in accordance with results found in other languages.