A princesa ficou *adormir ou a dormir? Dados sobre a consciência da unidade palavra em Português europeu

The current study describes the performance of Portuguese children when faced with an evaluation task concerning their awareness of the word unit. Different SVO sentences were presented to Portuguese children from three different groups (1st graders; 3rd graders at the onset of the academic year; 3rd graders at the end of the academic year); the subjects’ ability to isolate nouns, verbs, determiners (stressed, unstressed) and prepositions was tested in a sentence segmentation task. The results revealed low levels of success in the 1st graders and an increase of success rates in the 3rd graders, showing that awareness of the word unit is not early mastered. Moreover, a positive effect of explicit knowledge in the performance of the sentence segmentation task was not attested. The data discussion was performed on the basis of the impact of prosodic and syntactic effects in the subjects’ behavior.