Efeito de priming no processo tradutório de palavras homógrafas interlinguísticas, português brasileiro-inglês

Abstract

The present study delimits itself to Translation Studies in the light of Psycholinguistics, and the general purpose involves investigating the cognitive processes involved in translation, at the word level, through the technique of repetition priming and the recognition and lexical access from interlinguistic homographic words. For its operationalization, this objective was branched into two specific objectives: 1) Identify whether there is a difference in the processing cost of interlingual homographic words, Brazilian Portuguese-English, and nonhomographic interlingual words in a language decision task; 2) Identify the repetition priming effects of homographic and non-homographic words in a translation task. We point to the studies by Ferreira, Schwieter and Gile (2015), He (2019), Dijkstra et al. (2018), Pu et al. (2019), Van Assche, Brysbaert and Duyck (2020), Lameira, Torresi and Carthery-Goulart (2020), Hvelplund (2017), Lee, Jang and Choi (2018) and Francis and Goldmann (2011), besides other authors, as a basic theoretical contribution. In this way, we used a quantitative experimental methodology in real time, online, as during the development of this study we experienced the greatest sanitary crisis of all times, COVID-19 pandemic which made it impossible to carry out the experiments in person, in the laboratory of the teaching and learning institution. This methodology, in real-time, online, provided us with information about the response time and accuracy of the participants (23 English teachers) when performing a language decision task and a translation task, which we classified as Experiment 1 and Experiment 2, compiled in the PsyToolkit software (STOET, 2010, 2017). Furthermore, we considered the lack of investigations about interlingual homographic words in real-time (online) processing experiments. Our corpus consisted of thirty-four interlingual homographic words, thirty-four control words in Brazilian Portuguese, and thirty-four control words in English. For statistical analysis, we used the RStudio software and ran the data according to Analysis of Variance (ANOVA). We submitted these data to the Shapiro-Wilk, Tukey posthoc and Chi-Square tests, which provided us with evidence regarding the organization and processing of the bilingual mental lexicon related to the interference effects of the interlingual homographs during the execution of the two proposed experiments. According to the results, we were able to confirm the first hypothesis raised, prior to this study, in which: H1 – There are significant effects of interlingual homographs and interlingual non-homographs in a language decision task, reflected in a higher processing cost. And we partially confirmed the second hypothesis, in which H2 – There are repetition priming effects of homographic and non-homographic interlinguistic words in the translation process, because there was no repetition priming effect for the interlingual homographs (HG). There was a repetition priming effect only, for the “old” control words (CV), non-homographs. Our study contributed to the understanding of the organization of the mental lexicon process of bilinguals, as interlingual homographs have lexical representations in the bilingual's two languages and these representations are activated even when the task is only focused on L2 (Experiment two). These double representations cost more lexical processing than nonhomographic words (Experiment 1). Our results suggest that frequency might be a more determining factor in lexical access than the status of the native language (L1) and the foreign language (L2), as homographic words and their respective control words were more frequent in L2 than in L1 and they were activated more quickly. Finally, our study could benefit the methodological strategies employed by translators and bilingual teachers in the areas of Translation Studies and Psycholinguistics.