Avaliação da consciência sintática. Processos de concordância e ordem de palavras através de uma tarefa de juízo de aceitabilidade e correção

Language assessment batteries and syntactic awareness assessment tests often include syntactic awareness tasks by means of acceptability judgement and correction. However, it is not always clear which specific linguistic process is being assessed. The current study uses an acceptability judgement task to assess the sensitivity of preschool children and primary school children (2nd and 4th graders) to different agreement processes (nominal agreement in gender and number, between determiner and noun and between noun and adjective, and verbal agreement in number between subject and verb), as well as their sensitivity to different word order phenomena (auxiliary-verb / verb-auxiliary, determiner-noun / noun-determiner, adjective-noun / noun-adjective and adverb-verb / verb-adverb). The results show that awareness to agreement problems develops earlier than awareness to word order problems, with an earlier sensitivity to local and more categorical processes compared to less local and less categorical processes. We conclude that a fine-grained analysis of the type of process that is assessed in syntactic awareness tasks is important to build diagnosis materials focusing on this kind of syntactic knowledge.