HYPERNYM EFFECT IN THE PROCESSING OF NOUNPHRASE ANAPHORS IN BRAZILIAN PORTUGUESE

Abstract

In this work, syntactic and semantic parallelisms are used to investigate relations of hyponym and hypernym between antecedent and coreferential anaphoric expression in Brazilian Portuguese. We report two studies using data from eyetracking experiments. Precisely, eye movements of 21 participants are analysed while reading a set composed of 40 sentences. Our results suggest that the coreferential processing cost for hypernym condition is lower than for hyponym condition. Although our findings corroborate previous studies on total reading times, different processing costs among constituents of the sentence could not be identified.

Keywords

• correferência
• resolução anafórica
• paralelismo