A prosódia e o processamento on-line de sentenças ambíguas do português brasileiro

Abstract

The thesis analyzes the role of prosody in the resolution of global ambiguity in sentences of the type NP1 - V - NP2 - Adverb of place (NP) - Adverb of intensity (‘bastante’ / ‘very’) - Attribute (“O guitarrista recebeu o baterista no quarto bastante drogado” / “The guitarist received the drummer in the room very drugged”, for example), in Brazilian Portuguese, through the use of off-line and on-line methods of linguistic processing. We consider the hypothesis that prosodic cues, such as stress and pause, aid in the process of disambiguation (both in isolation and in conjunction) and that such clues may also contribute to anticipating the interpretation/preference for a referent even before the attribute is uttered. The experimental paradigm of the present study combined off-line (questionnaire results) and on-line (through eye tracking) measurements. Thus, we tested our hypothesis through a questionnaire whose response options were presented on a Likert scale, and through an on-line eye tracking experiment with the visual world paradigm. For that, the sentences were presented under the following conditions: i) N: neutral (ambiguous); ii) F: focusing on the subject and the adverb of intensity (manipulation of the fundamental frequency); iii) P: pause of 200 ms before the adverb of intensity; and iv) FP: conditions (ii) and (iii) simultaneously. The utterances have been manipulated in order to keep all other factors constant, and so, finding differences between conditions means evidence for the influence of stress and/or pause in the interpretation of this type of ambiguity. The results of off-line measurements revealed predominance of non-local apposition judgments in all analyzed conditions, however, the choice of assigning the adjective to the first nominal phrase increased, in a statistically significant way, in the conditions in which there was prosodic manipulation (F, P, FP) for that purpose. As with the off-line experiment, we noticed, from the results of the on-line experiment, that the structural factor of the first mention (early closure) had a strong influence on the resolution of referential expressions in the type of sentences we used. The results presented by the measures of analysis of the proportions of looks in the on-line experiment, besides validating the method of the visual world paradigm used in our experiment, suggest that stress and pause are independent factors that influence the anaphoric preference very early during processing. In the "neutral" condition, disambiguation begins in the segment ‘adj’ (attribute), whereas in conditions F, P and FP, disambiguation already seems to be defined in the segment ‘bastante’/‘very'. Upon hearing the segment ‘bastante’/ ‘very’, the preference for NP1 increased significantly even before the adjective was processed, and conditions F, P, and FP showed an increasing effect on the number of looks to the NP1. These factors (stress and pause) add up and that is why the combined condition (PF) is stronger than the other two (F and P) separately. The results presented in both experiments show evidence for the confirmation of our hypothesis, in addition to finding that the parser accesses prosodic information during the construction of syntactic structures and in the processing of ambiguous structures in Brazilian Portuguese.