ANÁLISE DA EFICIÊNCIA DA TÉCNICA DE MAZE TASK NO ESTUDO DA PENALIDADE DO NOME REPETIDO

Abstract

This work investigates the efficiency of a underexplored methodology for experimental psycholinguistics: the Maze Task technique (Forster et al., 2009), through the study of the anaphoric processing of repeated nouns and full pronouns in Brazilian Portuguese (BP). At the same time while seeking to evidence the occurrence of the repeated-name penalty (RNP) effect — in which the cost of syntactic processing in reading repeated nouns is higher when compared to pronouns — in establishing coreference in BP. To this end, the stimuli from the study by Leitão (2005) and Leitão, Ribeiro and Maia, (2012) where the methodologies of self-paced reading and eye tracking were used, respectively, were adapted. The experiment was programmed and implemented using the PCIBex platform, and the results obtained were compared with the products of previous research that used the same stimuli. The results point to the occurrence of RNP in Brazilian Portuguese and show that the maze task technique was as efficient as the experimental self-paced reading technique and the eye tracking technique in capturing this effect.