Efeitos da probabilidade transicional e fonotática na extração de palavras e mapeamento simultâneo com estímulos visuais ao longo de tentativas ambíguas

Abstract

The present study aimed to investigate the effect of the alignment or misalignment of transitional and phonotactic probabilities on a task of segmentation and simultaneous mapping across ambiguous trials. Forty individuals participated and they were randomly assigned to two groups. The first group listened to a language with aligned probabilities and the second group listened to the same language, but with misaligned probabilities. The experiment was conducted in the Laboratory of Social Interactions of UFSCar and the tasks were presented on a video monitor and performed with the help of a keyboard connected to the notebook where the program was run. The experiment consisted of computer tasks divided into three phases: familiarization with the language, a segmentation test and a mapping test. After doing the tests, participants answered a questionnaire containing questions about their fluency in other languages. The hypothesis was that the word mapping would facilitate word segmentation regardless of the alignment or misalignment of the two probabilities. The results showed that participants of language 1 were able to extract the words and map them to their referents. Language 3 participants, however, did not segment the words above chance, but were able to map them to their referents. Possibly, misalignment of the probabilities affected the preference in the segmentation test. A next study needs to investigate the segmentation process with L3 in order to explain the results obtained in the present study.