The processing of Topic-Comment Structures in Brazilian Portuguese: a visual world paradigm study

Abstract

The aim of this study is to investigate topic-comment and subject-predicate structures in Brazilian Portuguese (BP), through the experimental psycholinguistics approach, in order to bring empirical support to the hypothesis that BP would be a mixed language (Li & Thompson, 1976), in which both, topic and subject ideas are important. In other words, BP would be both a discourse-oriented and sentence-oriented language, unlike English, that is, undoubtedly, a sentence-oriented language. Base-generated topic structures will be investigated, because such structures are prototypical in a topicprominent language, as Chinese, in which the topic notion is central, but absent in a language in which the subject notion is predominant, as English (Yuan, 1995), in addition to the topic structures generated through syntactic movement (topicalization). The visual world paradigm experiment found that Brazilian Portuguese speakers are sensitive to prosodic cues present in auditory stimuli. That is, when they received an auditory input that favors a subject, the speakers focused more on the image that contained a subject NP and chose the option that represented a Subject-Predicate sentence. On the other hand, when listening to an auditory input that favored a topic element, the speakers focused more on the image that contained a topic NP and selected the option that contained a topic-comment Sentence. These results suggest a classification for BP as a mixed language.