Priming grafo-fônico-fonológico em multilíngues: uma abordagem dinâmica.

Abstract

This study had as main goal to investigate the role of the grapho-phonicphonological priming in a lexical decision task in multilinguals in Portuguese (L1), English (L2) and French (L3). The specific goals for this research were: 1) to verify whether the possible grapho-phonic-phonological similarities among words of L1, L2 and L3 would influence the reaction time in a lexical access task with priming; 2) to investigate whether the level of proficiency on each of the multilinguals languages would influence on the transfer processes, making the score and the reaction time vary in accordance with the force of language attractor. In the experiment, there were 90-paired words, in which half presented the supposed grapho-phonic-phonological similarities among the languages, whilst the other half did not present the supposed grapho-phonic-phonological similarities among the languages. In order to build and test the experiment, the E-Prime 2.0 software was used, through which it was possible to capture the reaction time and the number of right answers provided by each participant. The lexical access task predicted that the participants would receive the two stimuli, a prime and a target word, having to react to the second stimulus, assigning an answer, pointing it out to each language the target word was part of. The hypothesis for the study were: 1) when the primes exhibited the supposed grapho-phonic-phonological similarities with the target word, the reaction time would be slower. However, when the prime and the target word did not share the supposed grapho-phonic-phonological similarities, the reaction time would be faster. Considering that the linguistic knowledge is interactive, it is supported that the supposed grapho-phonic-phonological similarities prompt the activation of distinct grapho-phonic-phonological correlations, resulting in lexical competition (VAN GELDER e PORT, 1995; ELMAN et al., 1996; ELMAN, 1998; DIJKSTRA et al.,1999; MACWHINNEY, 2002, 2005, 2007; DE BOT, 2004; RODRIGUEZFORNELLS et al., 2005; LARSEN-FREEMAN e CAMERON, 2008; DERAVI, 2009); add to that the fact that the paired words exhibit different semantic contents; 2) the levels of proficiency that the multilinguals have in each of the three languages would influence in the reaction times and in the accuracy during the lexical decision task. When presented on the prime position, the languages in which the informants have higher levels of fluency and more frequency of exposure would delay the reaction times and would affect the correctness with which the participants assign an answer to the target words during the task. (WOUTERSEN, 1997; HERMANS et al., 1998; LEMHÖFER et al., 2004; BLANK e ZIMMER, 2010; PREBIANCA, 2014; KROLL et al., 2013) Through the help of the statistical analysis made the software SPSS 22, it was corroborated a significant statistical difference in the first hypothesis. The second hypothesis was only partially corroborated.