A influência grafo-fônico-fonológica na produção oral e no processamento de priming em multilíngues : uma perspectiva dinâmica

Abstract

This dissertation aims to investigate the influence of grapho-phonic-phonological knowledge on both vowel production and the processing of priming among multilinguals. For that purpose, 5 multilingual speakers of Brazilian Portuguese (L1), Spanish (L2) and English (L3) were selected to take part in tasks of oral reading of words in the three languages, while other 20 multilingual individuals, speakers of Brazilian Portuguese (L1), French (L2) and English (L3), participated in a lexical task containing grapho-phonic-phonological priming. The 20 multilinguals were further assigned to a group of 10 academic multilinguals, or to a group of 10 participants called immersion context (Canada). Four specific goals were laid out. For the vowel production study, the focus was the extent to which vowels production in the participants’ L1, L2 and L3 was influenced by linguistic proficiency and by graphophonic- phonological characteristics of the tested languages. For the priming study, it was investigated whether grapho-phonic-phonological similarities among words in the three languages influence on reaction time, and whether the degree of proficiency in each one of the multilinguals’ language would determine in each direction the interlinguistic transfer would occur. Finally, the role of the context of L2 and L3 immersion in the transfer of grapho-phonic-phonological patterns was also investigated. Multilinguals’ vowel production was analyzed in the software Praat. F1, F2 and duration values were statistically analyzed, and a strong association between L1 and L2 vowels, as well as L1 and L3 vowels, was found. For the priming study, it was found that academic multilinguals process lexical items containing a graphophonic- phonological relation between prime and target in a slower fashion than items without this relation between prime and target. However, linguistic proficiency did not show an effect on the performance of participants in the priming study. On the hand, multilingual individuals in immersion context process lexical items bearing a graphophonic- phonological relation between prime and target in a significantly slower fashion than they process non-related prime-target. The comparison between the results of the groups of multilinguals led to the finding multilingual individuals in immersion context present a significantly longer time to process target-prime pairs containing related grapho-phonic-phonological priming. The findings are discussed in the perspective of the Dynamic Systems Theory.