A influência da competência leitora no acesso lexical de estudantes do ensino médio regular e EJA e do ensino superior

Abstract

This quantitative and qualitative study arose from the need to explain, through psycholinguistics, how lexical access occurs in students with different levels of reading proficiency. The main objective of this dissertation was to investigate the correlation between reading competence and the processing of morphologically complex words in Brazilian Portuguese, with a view to characterizing how lexical access occurs during the reading of written words. In this sense, we sought to: (1) correlate the influence of reading with the processing of morphologically complex words; (2) investigate whether lexical access is strongly affected by reading competence and, finally, (3) compare performance between different groups of students (High School in Regular and Youth and Adult Education Modalities and Higher Education) to verify whether the discrepancy in reading competence interferes with lexical access and, therefore, with the processing of morphologically complex words. The hypothesis suggested for this research was that more proficient readers tend to process complex words faster (DEHAENE, 2012; GABRIEL, 2016) and, as a result, would present lower Reaction Time (RT) and higher Percentage Index of Correct Answers and , therefore, it was expected to find significant differences in performance between groups of students. In methodological terms, we used two data collection instruments to analyze the impact of reading competence on the processing of morphologically complex words, namely: (1) the experimental Open Priming technique, through the PCIbex Farm virtual platform – elaborated from the contributions by Garcia (2009) and Estivalet (2019) to capture the RTs and the Hit Index and whose stimuli were: words (subdivided into high frequency and low frequency into four types of relationship: 'morphological', 'semantic', 'phonological' and 'neutral'), non-words (subdivided into 'with morpheme' and 'without morpheme') and distractors (subdivided into 'words' and 'non-words') and (2) the Reader Profile Questionnaire, through Google Forms – based on the contributions of Simões (2019) and Soares (2018) to collect information on individual perception and the influence of the classroom on students‟ reading habits and, thus, distribute them into the categories of „Good Readers‟ – GR and „Readers with Difficulties in Understanding‟ - RDU (SOUSA, HÜBNER, 2019). The results obtained were the following: (i) for the analysis of the RTs, through the statistical tests ANOVA and Test-T, both Main Effects ('Type of Prime-Target Relation', 'Frequency' and 'Education') were found as for Interaction Effects ('Type of Prime-Frequency Relation' in which there were differences between the conditions regarding the frequency in each analyzed group); (ii) for the analysis of the Percentage Index of Correct Answers, it was verified that Higher Education (between 98% and 100%) got more correct answers than High School (between 60% and 95%); (iii) for the analysis of the Reader Profile Questionnaire, it was observed that High School students in the Regular and Youth and Adult Education modalities tend to be RDU (because they are less proficient) and Higher Education students tend to be GR (because they are more proficient). In view of this, it is concluded that the evidence of this study points to the repercussion of reading competence in lexical access, in addition to the trends of our priming experiment, corroborate the findings of Garcia (2009) about the role of morphology in word processing, the study that supported this research.