O papel do bilinguismo no desempenho de adultos em tarefas envolvendo controle inibitório: uma abordagem dinâmica

Abstract

This study had as main goal to investigate the role of bilingualism in the execution of inhibitory control, based on a dynamic approach (VAN GELDER and PORT, 1995). Therefore, it was sought to verify if there would be any significant differences in the inhibitory control of monolinguals and bilinguals, considering the different levels of linguistic proficiency and the proximity between the languages spoken by the bilinguals. The target public were twelve monolingual participants and twelve late bilinguals. The bilingual participants took leveling tests in their foreign languages, which could be Spanish or English, presenting low, intermediate or high levels of proficiency. All participants were adults between the ages of 25 and 35 who had graduated from college or were about to. To develop the present research, a Stroop Test of colors and words was developed, using E-Prime 2.0 software.Through this software, it was possible to attain the number of right answers and the reaction times of the participants in order to provide an answer to all the tested items on the different tasks that were applied on the participants. The collected data were statistically treated through SPSS 18. The obtained results show that the bilinguals reached a lower average in reaction time than the monolinguals, exhibiting a significant statistical difference on the matter. However, in the accuracy, this difference was not verified. Regarding to the proficiency levels on L2, even though it was confirmed the difference in the reaction times of the bilingual group according to the different proficiency levels, this difference it was not statistically significant. With regard to the proximity of the languages, the Portuguese-Spanish bilingual group showed longer reaction time in comparison to the Portuguese-English bilingual group. Nonetheless, the difference did not prove to be statistically significant. On this dissertation, those findings are discussed in the light of the Dynamic Systems Theory.