Processamento bilíngue e interferências do português (L1) na produção escrita em inglês (L2) - indícios em estudos de caso

Abstract

The Psycholinguistics of Bilingualism understands bilingual processing as a predominantly nonselective phenomenon (COSTA, 2005; LA HEIJ, 2006; GROSJEAN, 2012; FINGER and PREUSS, 2018), by which two linguistic systems are activated in parallel, and the speaker must retrieve the right information from their mental lexicon. According to the authors, multiple activation enables competition amongst lexical items, allowing interference from one language into another. Based on this assumption, the present exploratory study aims at providing evidence that supports this hypothesis. For this purpose, spontaneous written texts produced by two Brazilian bilingual groups (Portuguese-English) with different degrees of expertise in the target language (incipient and productive) were examined. Following the analysis and categorization of data, we observed that there are semantic, syntactic, morphologic and orthographic aspects that point in the direction of competitive selection. It is equally possible that other elements, such as the proficiency level in a foreign language, be able to affect the strength of activation.