Banca de QUALIFICAÇÃO: NEEMIAS SILVA DE SOUZA FILHO

Uma banca de QUALIFICAÇÃO de MESTRADO foi cadastrada pelo programa.
STUDENT : NEEMIAS SILVA DE SOUZA FILHO
DATE: 31/08/2020
TIME: 09:00
LOCAL: Online
TITLE:

Lexical prediction mechanisms in Brazilian Portuguese: addressing methodological issues

KEY WORDS:

Psycholinguistics, Language comprehension, Predictive language processing, Self-paced reading

PAGES: 56
BIG AREA: Linguística, Letras e Artes
AREA: Linguística
SUMMARY:

A series of studies conducted in the early 2000s reported evidence suggesting that specific lexical
items and some of their features (e.g., word form and grammatical gender) could be predicted
during language comprehension (DELONG et al., 2005; VAN BERKUM et al., 2005). These
studies mainly reported evidence from electroencephalography experiments, but the work
conducted in Dutch by Van Berkum and colleagues (2005) included a self-paced reading
experiment, in which the authors found larger reading times for sentences containing nouns that
were unlikely in context, but still plausible. Such effect was registered before the presentation of
the critical nouns themselves in the sentences, making it impossible to attribute the difference in
reading times to explanations other than prediction. The words that triggered the reported finding
in the Dutch study were adjectives, all of which preceded the critical noun they modified and were
inflected for gender to show agreement with it. Exploring the same morphosyntactic property, we
conducted a self-paced reading experiment with 339 participants who had Brazilian Portuguese
(BP) as a first language. Our objective was to investigate whether grammatical gender cues can be
used to make predictions during language comprehension, thus generating effects such as the ones
previously reported in the literature. To do so, we created 20 experimental items that comprised
two sentences: in the first, a simple situation was introduced (e.g., “The couple looked at the
restaurant menu until they could make up their minds”); in the second, the situation unfolded either
in a way that was likely (e.g., “They then called the waitress, who wrote down the long and detailed
order on her pad”) or unlikely (e.g., “They then called the waitress, who wrote down the long and
detailed note on her pad”). The key difference is that the critical nouns in the second sentence
(‘order’ vs. ‘note’) always had different grammatical genders in BP, which were marked in the
preceding adjectives (‘long’ and ‘detailed’). If gender cues do trigger prediction effects, larger
reading times were to be expected in the unlikely condition, both for the critical noun and the words
that preceded it. Our results, however, indicated clear differences between conditions only in the
critical nouns’ reading times. A statistically significant difference in preceding words was only
observed when reading times were analyzed in their raw distribution, without logarithmic
transformation.

BANKING MEMBERS:
Presidente - 1153427 - MAHAYANA CRISTINA GODOY
Interna - 1666189 - JANAINA WEISSHEIMER
Externa à Instituição - LARISSA SANTOS CIRÍACO - UFMG