Conjugation of irregular verbs by native Brazilian Portuguese speaking children: a study in the light of lexical phonology and morphology

This study investigates the acquisition of irregular verbs in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) when conjugated in the Indicative Present, Subjunctive Present and Simple Past tenses by native BP speaking children. It aims at describing and analyzing the interaction between Morphology and Phonology which is found in the inflection of irregular verbs, in the light of Lexical Phonology and Morphology (LPM). Data show that linguistic phenomena of morphophonological origin, which are highly complex, can be considered processes of late acquisition by Brazilian children. LPM leads to the understanding that verb regularization, one of the manifestations of irregular conjugations, can be explained by the non-correspondence between the phonological and morphological levels of the language.