Saliência e influência translinguística da L1 sobre a L2: investigando as dificuldades relacionadas à morfologia flexional da língua inglesa por falantes do português brasileiro

Abstract

This thesis introduces a study in psycholinguistics on the effects of salience and crosslinguistic influence in the perception and processing of the English inflectional morphology (the target structure of this research) of bilingual speakers who have Brazilian Portuguese (BP) as their first language (L1). Its main objective is to enlighten the comprehension about difficulties with the English inflectional morphology by BP bilingual speakers whose second language (L2) is English. As minor objectives, this research (i) assesses whether the choices between verbs displayed on screen during the Maze Task were made by participants based on semantic or syntactic criteria; (ii) tests whether redundancy is a facilitator or a distractor to the formation of grammatical sentences; (iii) assesses, through the comparison between morphemes –s (present tense third person singular) and –ed (past tense regular form), the influence of attention to BP linguistic cues; and finally, (iv) tests whether the greatest salience of some irregular past tense verbs is a facilitator in the perception of ungrammaticalities. With the intent of fulfilling those objectives, an experiment was carried through. It featured the appliance of a lexical leveling test to classify the bilinguals, the Vocabulary Levels Test (VLT), and the appliance of two methods entirely built in English: the Maze Task, dedicated to the first two minor objectives listed, and the Acceptability Judgement, dedicated to the last two minor objectives listed. Concerning the Maze Task, one of the methodological objectives of this research was to test an off-line version of this method. The results obtained through statistical analysis suggested that Brazilian bilinguals notice the absence of –ed more easily than they do that of –s, and also that there are no significant differences in the comparison between regular and irregular past tense verbs. However, it could not be assessed whether the choices of the participants were based on semantic or syntactic criteria, nor if redundancy is a facilitator or distractor to grammatical sentence formation because the Maze Task has not shown to be appropriate for elucidation of the investigation. These findings were discussed in light of the Unified Competition Model, the Input Processing Model, among other theoretical constructs.