A influência da coesão e da coerência no processamento correferencial de pronomes e nomes repetidos em português brasileiro

Abstract

The present study investigated the influence of cohesion and coherence during coreferential processing. Studies show that pronouns are more dependent on the linguistic context than repeated names (GARROD et al., 1994), and that connectives facilitate sentence processing (SANDERS; NOORDMAN, 2000). Using the technique of self-paced reading, we carried out two experiments to investigate anaphoric processing with pronouns and repeated names. We manipulated cohesion resources (connectives) and coherence of experimental sentences. The results show that, in experiment 1, issues of incongruity or the presence of connectives did not affect pronoun processing. In experiment 2, there were significant differences in reading times for reading the anaphoric resumption with repeated names. The processing of incongruous elements and linguistic anaphoric resumption with repeated names is more costly for a reader’s working memory when compared with the processing of inconsistencies and pronominal anaphora. The informational load hypothesis (ALMOR, 1999) may explain the results from experiments with pronouns and repeated names.