A COMPUTATIONAL EFFICIENCY PRINCIPLE IN ACTION IN THE PROCESSING OF RECURSIVELY EMBEDDED PPS IN BRAZILIAN PORTUGUESE AND IN KARAJÁ

Abstract

This paper presents and discusses two eye-tracking experiments comparing the processing of coordination and embedding of Prepositional Phrases in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) and of Postpositional Phrases in Karajá. Experiment 1 compares the processing of sentences containing Prepositional Phrases which may be self-embedded or conjoined in Brazilian Portuguese. Experiment 2 compares the processing of sentences containing Postpositional Phrases which may be self-embedded or conjoined in Karajá. 20 Brazilian Portuguese (BP) and 20 Karajá subjects had their eye movements monitored as they performed a sentence/picture matching task including sentences in BP and in Karajá, respectively. Based on previous studies reported in Maia et al (to appear), two hypotheses were formulated, both for BP and Karajá, namely, (i) launching the self- embedding of PPs would be more costly to process than launching the conjoining of PPs; (ii) after launching, the subsequent self-embedding of a third PP would be less costly than the previous PP. Results confirmed these predictions and are analyzed in terms of a third factor computational effect learning algorithm.---Original in English.