Variação lexical no 9º ano do Ensino Fundamental II: um estudo sobre crenças dos estudantes e processamento de variantes regionais

Abstract

This project is an interface between psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics in order to address a topic that has not yet been widely researched in Brazil: the processing of linguistic variation at the lexical level in relation to beliefs about this variation. Based on this, the general objective was to verify how the linguistic beliefs of elementary school students relate to the processing of a regional lexical variant. The specific objectives were: to investigate the effect of diatopic linguistic variation on word processing; to analyze 9th grade students' beliefs about regional linguistic variation at the lexical level; and to relate students' beliefs about diatopic linguistic variation to processing data. To do this, we used empirical studies on variation processing (Henrique, 2016; Marcilese et al., 2017; Azalim et al., 2018; Freitag; Souza, 2019; Souza; Freitag, 2021; Freitag; Sá, 2019; Jakubów; Corrêa, 2019) and studies on linguistic beliefs (Marques; Baronas, 2015; Frasson, 2016; Santos, 2017; Silva, 2019; Correia, 2022). In order to achieve the proposed objectives, a lexical decision task and a questionnaire on beliefs were applied to 9th grade elementary school students from a state school located in the city of Bagé (RS). In addition, three pilot studies were carried out to make the data collected more reliable. The results found in this task show that the regional variant, even though it is used daily by the students, required more cognitive effort to process, because the students are in a school environment, i.e. they are in a literacy context, where they are encouraged to use the standard variant. In addition, the modality of written presentation may have influenced processing. With regard to beliefs, it was noted that students perceive that there is a standard and correct language, which often leads them to not recognize the linguistic diversity that they bring into the classroom. In addition, the majority of students recognize the existence of regional variation; however, not all of them realize that there is also variation within Rio Grande do Sul. In the comparative analysis of the results found in the lexical decision task and the beliefs questionnaire, it was found that good performance in processing the stimuli was not related to more positive beliefs about linguistic variation. In general, it was found that the students' linguistic beliefs were not related to word processing. Reconciling a psycholinguistic approach with sociolinguistic findings can help to improve understanding of how linguistic variation is thought of, represented and processed by elementary school students and have implications for mother tongue teaching.