O processamento sintático de frases contendo o pronome her em contexto de ambiguidade por brasileiros aprendizes de inglês como L2

Abstract

This work aims to investigate how Brazilian learners of English use the structural information during the resolution of coreference in sentences containing the ambiguous pronoun her in a position of object (NP) or possessive pronoun (SPEC). In English, in an intrasentencial context the pronoun her can generate ambiguity during processing if its unavailable antecedent matches in number and gender, however, the same pronoun is blocked by the principle B of Binding Theory (Chomsky, 1981). We investigate this phenomenon considering aspects of the Shallow Structure Hypothesis (SSH) Clahsen and Felser (2006). According to this hypothesis, L2 learners have a shallower grammar which is able to only successfully process unambiguous structures with low complexity. Through an on-line experiment of self-paced reading we verified if English learners at different levels of proficiency, were sensitive to the syntactic ambiguity of sentences containing the pronoun her, even though according to SSH their processing is more superficial.