Variação e processamento linguístico: um estudo experimental sobre a concordância nominal variável no PB

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the cognitive dimension of linguistic variation grounded on an empirical study about the processing of variable nominal agreement in Brazilian Portuguese. It focuses, specifically, on adult processing of the variable number agreement in the domain of the DP from a psycholinguistic point of view. To do so, we started from results presented in literature from studies conducted – mostly – in a sociolinguistic perspective. As theoretical and methodological foundation, this study conciliates the assumptions of the empirical psycholinguistics and is theoretically grounded in the language conception of minimalist version of Generative Theory. We assumed the hypotheses that there is a correlation between the presence of overt plural markers in the items within the DP and the processing cost of variable agreement during comprehension. Furthermore, we took into account that, in a cognitive sense, the influence of linguistic – specifically, phonic salience – and nonlinguistic constraints – in particular, level of education – can be relevant for the variation observed in the realization of number agreement in BP, as it has been suggested by sociolinguistic studies. The possible correlation between these two constraints and the linguistics processing of the variation was investigated. We present the results of two experiments conducted with BP adult speakers – the first one, conducted by means of a self-paced listening task, and the second one, using an elicited production by repetition task – which, taken as a whole, seem to be compatible with the idea that the two general rules of number agreement would be processed differently. The variable phonic salience, in turn, did not reveal a significant influence, contrary to the previous hypothesis.