O efeito de priming sintático no processamento de sentenças ativas e passivas do português brasileiro

Abstract

Syntactic priming is the effect of repeating a sentence structure previously processed. In general, in natural languages, active sentences are more frequent than passive structures in spoken language (88% in English, 92% in Dutch, 89.5% in Brazilian Portuguese). Nonetheless, passive structures such as “the woman was helped by the man” are also produced. It is possible to stimulate the production of passive (or infrequent) structures using a passive sentence as a prime (hence, syntactic priming). The effect of priming occurs when a passive sentence is offered and, subsequently, the speaker generates a passive sentence, indicating these two structures have a structural relation between them. In this research, we investigated the effect of syntactic priming during production of active and passive sentences by children and adults who are speakers of Brazilian Portuguese (BP). Our experiment is based on Segaert et al.’s (2011) syntactic priming paradigm of sentence production, used with Dutch adults. Our participants were 8 and 9-year-old-children, regularly enrolled in the public schools of the Project ACERTA (Avaliação de Crianças Em Risco de Transtorno de Aprendizagem from Instituto do Cérebro do Rio Grande do Sul (InsCer), and undergraduate students of the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS) and Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS). The objectives of this research were: (i) to investigate syntactic processing in children and adults using the syntactic priming paradigm; (ii) to investigate the syntactic priming effect in BP; (iii) to analyze the baseline (unprovoked, not-primed) frequency of passive and active sentences in oral language of BP speakers; (iv) to compare the production of passive and active structures in children and adults; (v) to address a possible effect of syntactic priming in the light of the cognitive theory of Implicit Learning (CHANG, DELL, GRIFFIN & BOCK, 2000; CHANG, DEEL & BOCK, 2006). The results indicate the baseline proportion of 89,5% of active sentences and 10,5% of passive in oral production in BP; the generation of passives by adults was higher than by children; the children produced, in addition to passive structures, other structures to topicalize non-agent. The production of short and long passives with agentive verbs seems to be productive in BP children in the study; the greater production of passives by adults may be related to a more frequent contact with reading and writing. The effect of syntactic priming occurred in children but not in adult speakers of BP.