Coordinators
Postdoc
Karina Gomes Bertolino (Lattes, ORCID, ResearcherID)
Project: Generic and existential null subjects: assessing child and adult grammar
Description: In this project, we compare different null subject languages with the objective of building a typology of generic and existential null subjects in impersonal sentences. This research will support or raise problems for the hypothesis that there is a parametric distribution of null subjects. The project also aims to study the production of generic and existential null subjects in the spontaneous speech of children acquiring Brazilian Portuguese.
PhD students
Camilla de Rezende (Lattes, ORCID, ResearcherID)
Project: Language processing and executive functions in different moments of life
Description: This research aims at investigating the relationship between executive functions (EF) and language processing, in order to verify whether this relation changes through life. For that, the behavior of children, adults and the elderly must be observed. Participants with the poorest performance in EF tasks are expected to display the longest reading time in a linguistic task. Age should be a relevant variable, since children and the elderly are more likely to have the poorest performance results in EF tasks.
Andressa Toni (Lattes, ORCID, ResearcherID)
Project: Underspecification and the phonological representation of CCV branching onsets in language acquisition
Description: The goal of this project is to better understand how children represent CCV branching onsets (Consonant1 + Consonant2 + Vowel) along their phonological development. We aim to investigate how the contrast between CCV-CV and between C/l/V-C/ɾ/V are stablished in the child's phonological system considering the poor general frequency of CCV in Brazilian Portuguese, its low functional load and its high tendency to be neutralized both in adult-to-adult speech and in child speech. We discuss experimental data from 75 toddlers checking if common child speech errors like /bɾuʃa/ >> [ˈbu.ʃɐ] 'witch', /bɾavo/ >> [ˈbla.vʊ] 'angry', /plãta/ >> [pɾã. tɐ] 'plant' are due to an initial absence of structural and segmental contrast between CCV-CV and C/l/V-C/ɾ/V.
Jonathan Torres (Lattes, ORCID, ResearcherID)
Project: Implicatures and Working Memory in Language Acquisition
Description: In this project we aim to investigate implicatures during the process of language acquisition by preschoolers. For that we are going to discuss spontaneous and experimental data under the scope of contextualists approaches to formal semantics and pragmatics that take the Question Under Discussion as an important condition for implicature triggering. Moreover, we also take into account working memory as a relevant resource for the calculation of implicatures.
Clariana Lara Vieira (Lattes, ORCID, ResearcherID)
Project: The acquisition of WH-questions in Brazilian Portuguese
Description: Her research focuses on the acquisition of WH-questions in Brazilian Portuguese and establishes an interface between syntax, pragmatics, semantics and prosody, based on spontaneous and experimental data. The researcher addresses in particular the acquisition of Wh-in situ and its relation to specific pragmatic contexts and its delay in acquisition.
Antonio Codina (Lattes, ORCID, ResearcherID)
Project: Article omission in the interlanguage of adult speakers of Brazilian Portuguese
Description: He conducts research in the framework of generative second language acquisition. In his ongoing PhD, he studies the acquisition of Spanish, French and English articles by Brazilian students, with a focus on their omission (singular and plural bare nouns).
Sonia Eliane Niewiadomski (Lattes, ORCID, ResearcherID)
Project: Sound characteristics of spoken Polish and Portuguese in Cruz Machado county, Paraná state
Description: Develops research in a bilingual community (Polish/Portuguese) in the state of Paraná. The study analyzes the processes of voice assimilation, deletion, insertion and / or segments deletion in the Polish language spoken by individuals of Polish ascendency. We seek to observe how these phonological processes interfere in the Brazilian Portugueses phonological system and vice-versa.
Masters
Juliana Barbosa (Lattes)
Project: The acquisition of French round vowels by Brazilian Portuguese native speakers
Description: The researcher develops a study on the perception and production of foreign language speech. Based on communication noises that can be caused by differences between phonetic and phonological systems, her research aims to identify transfers between foreign languages and the Brazilian Portuguese, focusing on the production of segments, phonological processes and prosody, markers of different foreign accents.
Undergrads
Mariana de Freitas Martins (Lattes)
Researcher working on the project "L1 and L2 Phonological Acquisition"
Miguel Fontes Meira (Lattes)
Researcher working on the project "A-Bar Dependencies and Executive Control in Language Acquisition"
Felipe Oliveira da Silva Netto (Lattes)
Researcher working on the project "A-Bar Dependencies and Executive Control in Language Acquisition"
CHILDES transcriptions technician
Esdras Silva dos Santos (Lattes)