Estereótipos sociais e processamento lexical

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the representation and lexical access of common nouns in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) that can assume literal, figurative, or stereotyped meanings depending on the context in which they occur. We adopted a methodology inspired by the work of Heredia and Blumentritt (2002), combining the semantic priming paradigm and a lexical decision task to research the possible effect of social stereotypes on linguistic processing. Specifically, we investigated the influence that stereotypes – which underlie the cognitive bases of linguistically encoded prejudices – can exert on human communication. The objectives of the study are: i) to discuss the notion of social stereotype from a cognitive perspective; ii) to investigate the comprehension of non-compositional words – stereotyped and non-stereotyped – in light of theories of representation and lexical access within the scope of psycholinguistics; iii) to develop an experimental study to contrast the processing of literal and figurative meanings (‘vaquinha’ little cow = animal X ‘vaquinha’ = fundraising) and literal and stereotypical meanings (cow = animal X cow = pejorative, derogatory term to refer to a woman); iv) to analyze the results obtained in light of the hypothesis of Heredia and Blumentritt (2002), according to which stereotypical meaning can be classified as a type of figurative meaning, and to evaluate to what extent stereotypical meanings are processed differently due to the activation of non-linguistic social representations. Our study also aims to contribute to the discussion regarding the nature and organization of the mental lexicon, as well as to a better understanding of the relationships between linguistic cognition and social cognition. Data collection was conducted using three instruments: (i) Pre-test of word association to assess preferential interpretations of items, with 42 participants; (ii) Experiment 1 - lexical decision task contrasting words with literal meaning X words with figurative meaning, with 42 participants; (iii) Experiment 2 - lexical decision task to contrast words with literal meaning X words with stereotyped figurative meaning, with 42 participants. The main results obtained indicate that: (i) both literal and non-literal meanings (stereotyped and non-stereotyped) are retrieved by speakers, but there is a predominance of the literal meaning in offline association tasks; (ii) in the contrast between literal and non-stereotyped figurative meanings, literal primes favor access to literal targets, while figurative primes activate both literal and figurative targets equally; (iii) in the contrast between literal and stereotyped meanings, stereotyped primes favor access to stereotyped targets, but not to literal targets. Taken together, the results are consistent with the idea that figurative words like "vaquinha" and stereotypical words like "piranha" (are not processed in the same way. While figurative items are associated with literal and non-literal meanings in a more polysemous relationship, stereotypical items seem to be recognized as words with independent meanings. We propose the hypothesis that the observed differences in the processing of these two types of items are related to the influence that social stereotypes exert on human cognition.