Sintaxe, efeito cognato e nível de proficiência em l2 no processamento de sintagmas nominais por bilíngues tardios português - inglês

Abstract

The main objective of this doctoral dissertation was to analyze the processing of prepositioned noun phrases with two nouns, as in barra de chocolate, by Brazilian late bilinguals with English as L2. We investigated the processing cost of different syntactic structures in L2: preposition of, genitive case and noun inversion, including as variables the cognate effect and the proficiency level in L2. The main thematic axes of this work were: (1) bilingual syntactic processing (Bernolet and Hartsuiker, 2018); (2) noun phrases (Miranda, 2021); (3) the cognate effect (Dijkstra et al., 2015; Poort and Rodd, 2017; Soares et al., 2018; Toassi and Pereira, 2019; Antón and Duñabeitia, 2020); and (4) proficiency level in L2 (Casaponsa et al., 2015; Lan et al., 2019). Three different experimental methods were used: translation recognition task, acceptability judgment task and syntactic selection task. To describe the participants profile, demographical and linguistic questionnaire and L2 vocabulary knowledge test were used. In the translation recognition task, the results indicated that accuracy was greater, and the reaction time was shorter in noun phrases with preposition of and with noun inversions and that there was a cognate facilitation effect on reaction time. In the acceptability judgment task, accuracy was also greater in sentences with preposition of and with noun inversion, the level of proficiency in L2 led to higher accuracy rates, reaction time was shorter in items with noun inversion and in items with cognates. In the syntactic selection task, the cognate effect and the proficiency level in L2 influenced the options chosen and the reaction time was influenced by the proficiency level in L2. The results can reinforce the model of L2 syntactic development for late bilinguals by Bernolet and Hartsuiker (2018) and the hypothesis of non-selectivity of languages in bilingual minds.