The translation of noun phrases: an experimental study

• Autor(a) principal: Lima Miranda, Daniele
• Data de Publicação: 2023
• Outros Autores: Freitas Pereira Toassi, Pamela
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: letrônica
• Texto Completo: https://revistaseletronicas.pucrs.br/ojs/index.php/letronica/article/view/44261
• topic: Translation; Noun phrases; Psycholinguistics; priming; Tradução; sintagma nominal; Psicolinguística; priming

We investigated how the translation of noun phrases with possession relationship between nouns is performed by Brazilian students with English as a foreign language, since this structure can be syntactically represented in different ways in Portuguese and in English. Our research involved 20 participants who spoke Brazilian Portuguese as their mother tongue and English as a second language. The experiment had a pre-test, translation task and post-test, applied in the PsyToolkit software (Stoet, 2010, 2017); English vocabulary knowledge test; and biographical and linguistic questionnaire. The results showed that the  participants were able to use the same syntactic structure of the prime translations more often in the production of their translations, as well as in Resende, Cowan and Way (2020) and Maier (2008) in translation tasks. Statistical analyzes in RStudio, using the Generalized Mixed Linear Model and the Mixed Linear Model, showed that there was a reduction in the cost of processing the English language in the post-test. These conclusions may indicate that there was implicit learning of the researched syntactic structure and that translation can be a good pedagogical tool in teaching and learning a foreign language, especially when it comes to grammatical aspects.