O acesso lexêmico por bilíngues e sua relação com os perfis de uso linguístico oral na L2

Abstract

This thesis aimed to investigate the lexemic access by L1 Brazilian Portuguese speakers in relation to the L2 English oral language usage profile. The nasal consonants (/m/ and /n/) in the end of syllables in English are difficult to distinguish for Brazilian speakers of L2 (BECKER, 2014) and were selected as objects of this study in words such as them /ðem/, and then /ðen/. In this sense, the investigation of lexical access competition in the lexical context occurred from eye tracking in experiments based on the visual-world paradigm (TANENHAUS et al., 1995; TANENHAUS, SPIVEY-KNOWLTON, 1996), where eye movement is mapped during simultaneous exposure to auditory stimuli and the presentation of four images or words on screen. We hypothesized that the lexemic competition for word recognition in bilingual speakers of the Portuguese-English linguistic pair would be largely modulated by the profile of linguistic use in English as a second language based on Exemplar Theory (BYBEE, 2001, 2010; JOHNSON , 1997, 2005; PIERREHUMBERT, 2001, 2003) that has use as the main factor in the development of mental representations. There were twenty-eight Brazilian English-L2 learners and nine native English speakers as a control group. The analysis showed that there is a significant difference in processing time between the native and non-native speakers group and that the higher oral language use in L2 has a positive and statistically significant impact on the intensity of competition in the lexemic context of lexical access for non-native speakers. The oral language use metric extracted and adapted from the questionnaire used by Valadares (2017) was therefore validated externally as a predictor of linguistic behavior. In addition, we discuss the role of lexical amplitude and accuracy in production as factors with minor impact on the intensity of lexemic competition and suggest a mental representation of the sound system in exemplars clouds.