Pistas prosódicas no acesso lexical on-line de falantes adultos do português brasileiro

Abstract

This study investigates the role of prosodic constituents’ boundaries in lexical processing by Brazilian Portuguese (BP) adult speakers. It is assumed that speech is organized in a hierarchy of prosodic constituents that interface with other grammatical constituents, although this relation is not necessarily mapped in a one-to-one fashion (NESPOR & VOGEL, 1986). Motivated by experimental evidence on the role of prosodic information in syntactic and lexical processing (CHRISTOPHE et al., 2004, MILLOTE et al., 2008; SILVA & NAME, 2009), two experiments are proposed in order to investigate the role of prosodic constituents’ boundaries in on-line lexical access by means of word monitoring tasks. The first experiment analyzed the local ambiguity (gol/golfe) effect on prosodic word boundaries (FPP): [gol ω final]. The second experiment examined the same effect on phonological phrase boundaries (FSF): [...gol] ϕ [ficou...]. The results indicate a significant ambiguity effect in the FPP condition and not in the FSF one. This means that the acoustic information in FSF played a significant role in the inhibition of competitor lexical items (golfe) in BP. The implications of this result for language processing are discussed in light of lexical access models (LEVELT, 1989; MCCLELLAND & ELMAN, 1986), the language computation model of the Minimalist Program (HAUSER, CHOMSKY e FITCH, 2002; CHOMSKY, 1999) and the possibility of integration between linguistic theory and language processing models (CÔRREA & AUGUSTO, 2006).