Processamento morfológico em adultos com gagueira

Abstract

This study analyzes volunteers who have stuttering compared to a control group. It is intended to contribute to a more accurate characterization regarding the linguistic components of stuttering, designed to investigate how lexical access is enabled on complex morphological formations (derivational morphology) in this population, since the stuttering occurs within words (intraword), for later, in the second experiment, analyze how the rules of inflectional morphology are processed and regulated by mental grammar. The hypothesis is that the volunteers who stutter have difficulty in activating lexical complex shapes, such as slowness and delays in the recovery of lexical items causing this differentiation process compared to the control group, a hypothesis consistent with the studies of Weber-Fox (2001). This research uses the theory proposed by the declarative / procedural model of Ulman (1997, 2001) which says that there is a dual system of memories that are responsible for certain types of morphology: a procedural memory that would regulate the rules of grammar in the training of mental morphemes (inflectional) and declarative memory responsible for storing idiosyncratic knowledge and irregular shapes (derivational morphology). This Ulman theory (2001, 2004) correlates with the neurophysiology of stuttering due to the mental grammar be rooted in the basal ganglia, site of neurological dysfunction in subjects with stuttering. Therefore, the first experiment was based on a experimental and transversal research, in which an psycholinguistic experiment was replicated, based on the studies of Garcia (2009), with online inquiry for understanding data, using the monomodal, undercovered priming methodology (visual) of derivational word reading with lexical decision in subjects who have persistent stuttering (diagnosed by an audiologist) and the control group, all subjects were native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese, aged between 17 and 37 years with complete secondary education. This methodology analyzes the morphological processing compared to semantic, phonological and unrelated information processing. Four conditions were exposed: morphologically related prime and target, phonologically related prime and target; semantically related prime and target, and finally, unrelated prime and target. In the second experiment, in order to analyze the inflectional morphology, we applied the auto-monitored reading technique with acceptability judgment by experimental sentences where the critical segment contained both inflected verbs under general regular rules as verbs that do not admit general rules. Overall, the results reported no significant differences between the two groups, showing similarity between them, not confirming therefore the hypothesis launched on this survey.