Repositório RCAAP

In this article, we investigated the processing of coreferential relations in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) to understand how this process develops in the human mind. The goal was to investigate how Principle A and Principle B of the Binding Theory (CHOMSKY, 1986) operate in the interpretation of coreferential anaphoric elements in sentences with reflexive pronouns. Using a self-paced reading paradigm, we replicated an experiment carried out by Oliveira et al. (2012), which investigated the influence of available and unavailable antecedents in the processing of the anaphoric element “a si mesmo(a).” In the present experiment, we only replaced the anaphoric word “a si” by “ele(a).” The goal was to investigate if the processing of the first element will be affected by Principle B or A. In the first case, if the pronoun “ele” is be bound to an antecedent out of the anaphora’s scope; in the second case, if the domain or if the following segment “mesmo(a)” is processed, there would be a reassessment of the initial decision from the interpretative process that forces application of Principle A. The results corroborate Nicol and Swinney’s (1989) study, and Oliveira, Leitão and Henrique’s (2012) study about Brazilian Portuguese. In both studies, the anaphora was related to the antecedent, i.e., the nearest element in relation to the Binding Theory.

To these days, a great number of literary works have focused on the fragmentation of the contemporary subject, specially through the voyage, errance and exile, movements that denounce the problem of identity and alterity; in the context of “migrant literatures” in the Americas, these aspects are recurrent. Many contemporary narratives bring autobiographical traces of their exiled of immigrant authors, who explore the errancy through their very particular angle. It is the case of Sergio Kokis and Dany Laferrière, who adopt in several novels their homelands as fictional space of the characters – respectively, Brazil and Haiti. Especially in the novels Errances (Kokis) and L’énigme du retour (Dany Laferrière), that have to do with the return of the exiled characters, the autobiographical aspect is present, thus weakening the borders between fiction and truth: the characters are migrant writers who take their ways back to their homelands in important political moments, the end of dictatorships. Both Kokis and Laferrière affirm, in autobiographical texts, that they use personal experiences as literary material for their fictional works, especially in the thematic field (the totalitarian regimes that led them to exile are alluded in several novels, and migrant subjects are also frequent). In this context, we intend to analyze certain questions about the by these authors in migrant literature in Quebec and the place these authors occupy, taking the mentioned novels as a starting point to explore the tension theses authors create between fiction and reality.

The present study investigated the influence of cohesion and coherence during coreferential processing. Studies show that pronouns are more dependent on the linguistic context than repeated names (GARROD et al., 1994), and that connectives facilitate sentence processing (SANDERS; NOORDMAN, 2000). Using the technique of self-paced reading, we carried out two experiments to investigate anaphoric processing with pronouns and repeated names. We manipulated cohesion resources (connectives) and coherence of experimental sentences. The results show that, in experiment 1, issues of incongruity or the presence of connectives did not affect pronoun processing. In experiment 2, there were significant differences in reading times for reading the anaphoric resumption with repeated names. The processing of incongruous elements and linguistic anaphoric resumption with repeated names is more costly for a reader’s working memory when compared with the processing of inconsistencies and pronominal anaphora. The informational load hypothesis (ALMOR, 1999) may explain the results from experiments with pronouns and repeated names.

The present paper addresses reading comprehension and its evaluation. The goal is to address, based on a theoretical review within the field of Psycholinguistics, the basic processes in the reader-text relationship; the study addresses, especially, top-down and bottom-up processes in the search for the construction of meaning. These processes develop from early alphabetization to later reading comprehension processes that require more sophisticated inference-making based, in turn, on implicit and explicit information. We discuss the metalinguistic aspects which should be made available to elementary school teachers so that they can develop activities aimed at helping readers achieve a deeper understanding of their comprehension processes. Different linguistic levels of texts and different cognitive strategies, used according to the activities proposed, should be taken into consideration in teaching and evaluation processes.

The present study investigates the acquisition of the aspectual category of two deaf children, one of whom underwent cochlear implant (CI) surgery. Our question is whether the hypotheses raised by Silva (2010) to explain the process of acquisition of aspectual category of a deaf children also apply to the deaf child who has a CI. The present study is based on both Comrie (1976) and Finau (2004), who focused on lexical and grammatical aspects and the opposition between perfective and imperfective. Our research is spontaneous in nature; we investigated children whose pseudonyms were ANA and BRUNO. Both are deaf children of deaf parents and were acquired Libras (Brazilian Sign Language) as their first language. ANA and BRUNO were filmed over three years; the data are part of the corpus of the research group on the acquisition of Brazilian Sign Language at UFSC, which is coordinated by Ronice Muller de Quadros. The transcription of data was carried out using the notation Sistema de Notação por Palavras (FELIPE, 1998). In the analysis, we observed that ANA as well as BRUNO produced, predominantly, the perfective lexical aspect; we also observed that the grammatical aspect of the productions occur via bending. These inflections occur through morphological change (movement); and they are mostly perfective. Our results show that a deaf child who has spoken language stimulation, through the presence of CI, and therefore, a bilingual/bimodal orientation, has the same linguistic category aspectual production in Libras as a Libras monolingual user. The hypotheses that explain the process of acquisition of aspectual category of a deaf child presented in Silva (2010) also apply to a deaf child with deaf parents and who has a CI.

This paper revisits the regeneration hypothesis, a proposal about the nature of the psycholinguistic mechanism that supports the immediate recall of sentences recently heard or read. We present a hypothesis about sentence recall in bilinguals, which is based on the assumptions of the regeneration hypothesis. According to the hypothesis, the mechanisms of new sentence production also operate in immediate sentence recall. We address such hypothesis with a study that aimed to investigate the accessibility to language-specific syntactic representations while bilinguals process another language. Results suggest there is such access to language-specific representation, but only for highly proficient bilinguals.

Semantic verbal fluency tasks (SVF) evaluate the ability to generate words from a given criterion in a specified time; these tasks allow for the investigation of language, memory and executive functions. This study aimed to investigate the performance of right hemisphere (RH) post stroke adults in an SVF task. Eleven adults with RH lesion and eleven healthy adults, matched by sex, education and age, were investigated. The participants completed an SVF task (clothes names); the total number of words, clustering and switching variables, and the conformation of semantic networks were measured through computational analysis. We found significant statistical differences in the total number of words (Z score). Topographic analysis of graphs showed a tendency toward smaller semantic networks in the RH lesion group compared with controls. Case series analyzes showed four individuals with deficits in the total number of words and in switching. These participants had predominantly frontal lobe and subcortical lesions, which indicates the interference of lesion-specific locations in the use of SVF strategies. The qualitative analyses presented are groundbreaking for the Brazilian context. We also note the importance of using comparisons between groups and case series analyzes in cognitive neuropsychology investigations.

The objective of present study was to investigate whether individual differences in working memory capacity of L2 learners predict listening comprehension performance in a proficiency exam. Participants included two groups of adult students (24 students in total) of English as an L2. In the first part of the experiment, the 24 adult students performed a Listening Mock test. In the second part of the experiment the 24 adult students performed a working memory span test. The hypothesis of the study was that individual differences in working memory capacity of L2 learners would predict listening comprehension performance in a proficiency test. The hypothesis was confirmed. Individual differences in working memory capacity predicted listening comprehension performance, showing that the larger the working memory storage capacity is, the higher the scores in listening comprehension tasks will be.

Professional proofreaders are responsible for correcting and improving text with the aim of improving the quality of written publications. The present paper addresses revision from a cognitive theoretical framework. From this perspective, editing has been approached as a sub-process of writing; more experienced text editors and proofreaders are better able to detect mistakes at more global levels; these mistakes, in turn, demand more processing. With the goal of investigating proofreading proficiency, a reading and error detection task is proposed. The task was performed by 14 proofreaders and by 14 non-professional proofreaders. The task consisted of reading and editing short journalistic texts, which were displayed on a computer. Proofreading was carried out by clicking the mouse on the mistakes and/or inadequacies found. The results show that proofreading proficiency is associated with the ability to detect specific error types.

In the present study, we analyze structures and processes which are needed for modeling the construction of the sense of space and movement from the linguistic clues "para" and "para dentro de" in Portuguese. The study presents the cognitive processes involved in the construction of meaning: constructional analysis, contextual resolution and mental simulation. The study also discusses the functioning of these three cognitive processes and how activation occurs, triggering of schemes, and how the connections between schema components are made. Finally, the study addresses how broader grammatical constructions are integrated into the meaning construction process, and also how some of inferences are drawn from different mental simulations

This study investigates whether Brazilian infants are able to analyze acoustic properties of linguistic input in order to perceive word and sentence boundaries (cf. NESPOR; VOGEL, 1986; PIERREHUMBERT, 1980; LADD, 2008). The focus of the study is on infant sensitivity to prosodic cues of Intonational Phrase (I) boundaries on Infant Directed Speech (IDS) stimuli; and on their ability to use cues in word discrimination tasks. Two activities were carried out: the first activity analyzed IDS utterances extracted from Brazilian mother-baby social interaction in order to identify prosodic properties of I-boundaries; the Second activity, an experimental one, tested whether 13-month Brazilian infants are sensitive to these properties and use them to discriminate a word with which they were familiar. The results suggest that prosodic I-boundary cues were perceived by babies and facilitated word segmentation. We argue that acoustic information presented in prosodic constituents boundaries are amplified on IDS stimuli and may facilitate language acquisition bootstrapping (cf. Prosodic Bootstrapping Hypothesis: MORGAN; DEMUTH, 1996; CHRISTOPHE et al., 1997).

On a general level, travel diaries offer an important way to access the singularity of travellers’ subjective experience and their reaction to the new society in which they intend to live. However, viewed as discourse, travel diaries also represent a tool which reveals sociocultural aspects of the new society itself. This paper aims to discuss aspects associated to P. K. Page’s view of mid-nineteenth Century Brazil. Thus, important questions arise, such as: how did Page view the local habits and customs of the time? What was her relationship with the Portuguese language during her process of adaptation? What were her impressions about Rio de Janeiro’s daily life? What impact did the household management have in her travel experience? To this purpose, the paper adopts the idea of travel diaries as historically situated discourse, taking Page’s Brazilian Journal (1987) as material for analysis. Results indicate that, although Page sincerely loved Brazil, she also made important social criticism of the country, very often through irony in her descriptions of daily life and the Brazilian management of domestic life.

Presentation of the issue Theories of Enunciation and Teaching

In this text, we intend to analyze as Jorge de Lima if it uses of reason of the voyage and their metaphorical-symbolic senses like the sea and the island in the construction of its poetical. In this perspective, Lima’s poetry will prioritize the act of the creation agreeing to the meaning constituent of the image of the voyage in modernity, that if of, mainly, in its amplitude.

Presentation of the Literature issue on Philosophy and Literature.

This paper discusses the representation of the memory in some narrators of Brazilian novels, of Recordações do Escrivão Isaías Caminha (1909), by Lima Barreto until Diário da Queda (2010), by Michel Laub, focusing on two important issues: the relationship between memory and the awakening of the senses and the appearing of the involuntary memory. Such themes permeate several areas of the hum an knowledge, such as philosophy, anthropology and psychology. Therefore, at the parallel to the way how the discourse of the narrator is prepared, reflecting on reminiscence, this essay also discuss some theoretical assumptions, using intellectuals such as Plato, Aristotle, Paul Ricoeur, Henri Bergson, Marcel Proust, Walter Benjamin, among others.

The fact that secondary stress occurs in pretonic syllables, one of the most favorable contexts for vowel epenthesis in Brazilian Portuguese, as pointed by sociolinguistics analysis, such as Collischonn (2002), and the observation that epenthesis creates a new syllable in this position seems to indicate that there may be correlation between this phenomenon and this type of stress. Collischonn (1994) and Moraes (2003) identify two trends in relation to the secondary stress attribution in Portuguese: initial prominence and binary alternation between strong and weak syllables. When a word has an even number of pretonic syllables these two trends can be met simultaneously; the same does not occur when the number of syllables is odd. In this paper, we investigate the possibility to occur more vowel epenthesis in words with an odd number of pretonic syllables to meet these two trends and also analyze the location of secondary stress in words with an odd number of pretonic syllables with and without vowel insertion. The sample consists of 8 interviews, belonging to the VARSUL database, with higher educated male and female subjects from Porto Alegre below 50 years old and over 50 years old.

This study investigated the performance of children with phonological disorders in the working memory skills and in the phonological awareness skills, which are parts of the phonological processing and, whether such skills are related to each other, to the chronological age and to the degree of the phonological deviation. The sample was composed of 28 children with phonological deviation, ranging from 4 years old to 6 years and 7 months old, illiterate, with a hypothesis of pre-syllabic writing and, it was divided into two groups as follows: one with 21 children with a more severe phonological deviation and the other with 7 children with a softer phonological deviation. Speech-language and hearing evaluations were undertaken in order to diagnose the phonological deviation along as phonological assessments to determine the phonological system and to rate the degree of the speech impairment through a qualitative analysis. The children’s performance in the working memory assessments was checked through the repetition of a sequence of four digits – to assess the central executive and the phonological memory and, the repetition of non-words task – to assess specifically the phonological memory, according to Baddeley and Hitch’s proposal (1974 apud GATHERCOLE; BADDELEY, 1993), revised by Baddeley (1986). The performance in the phonological awareness evaluation was also checked, including the syllabic and phonemic awareness. The results are as follows: 1) the sample has presented a lower performance in the phonological memory and phonological awareness when compared to the performance of children with normal phonological development as seen in further research conducted in Brazil by making use of similar assessment methods; 2) there has been a significant correlation between the repetition of non-words task and the syllable awareness; 3) there was a statistical correlation between age and the repetition of nonwords task and, a weak correlation between age and the digit repetitions and, between age and phonological awareness. Comparing the groups was found that the children with a more severe phonological deviation have performed lower in all the tasks when compared to the group of softer deviations and, such difference was significant in the total scores of the phonological and in the phonemic awareness. It concluded that the preschoolers with phonological deviation, when considered as a group and not individually, have presented worse performance in tasks of phonological awareness and phonological memory than groups of children with normal phonological development and, that such skills are correlated in a significant way. Children with more severe phonological deviation have presented worse performance than children with less speech impairments, with a statistical difference in the phonological awareness tasks.

This work aims to develop the concept of stranger in the novelette “Bem longe de Marienbad”, by Caio Fernando Abreu, through Julia Kristeva’s work, Strangers to ourselves, which explores subjective and psychological aspects of the person who is living in another country. The characters of the novelette, through their errant ways, introduce a new perspective to the idea of stranger, since the road can also be considered a home. Published in 1996, in the book Estranhos estrangeiros, “Bem longe de Marienbad” exposes what it is to be a stranger in terms of territory and perception of the world.

The present paper aimed to analyze the phonological acquisition profile of children with phonological deviation, particularly regarding the acquisition of rhotic consonants, taking into account the implicational rules related to the complexity of phonological systems, the goals of the Implicational Model of Feature Complexity (IMFC) proposed by Mota, 1996. The quantitative sample showed that the vibrant consonant, produced as fricative, emerges earlier than the tap, unlike the IMFC predicted. Nevertheless, it was observed that the children who are still acquiring the vibrant consonant often replace it with a liquid or glide consonant, indicating that, even though it is pronounced as a fricative, it features as a vibrant allophone