Word processing through lexical decision in Brazilian Portuguese: Blends, derived, and simplex words

What is it about?

This study investigates the word processing in Brazilian Portuguese, focusing on blends. Blends are words which juxtapose or overlap words and/or parts of words (e.g. portunhol = (portu)guês ‘Portuguese’ + espa(nhol) ‘Spanish’). We approached the processing of blends using a visual lexical decision task on different types of words and pseudowords. The results suggest that blends are accepted and processed differently from simplex and complex words, resembling pseudowords, contributing to a deeper understanding of blend processing, and providing insights into lexical access and morphological processing.

Featured Image

Photo by ALAN DE LA CRUZ on Unsplash

Photo by ALAN DE LA CRUZ on Unsplash

Why is it important?

While most research on blends has been conducted in languages other than Portuguese, such as English and French, this study addresses this gap by exploring the processing of blends in Brazilian Portuguese through a behavioural lexical decision experiment. These results contribute to a deeper understanding of blend description and provides insights into theoretical and empirical comprehension of morphology.

Perspectives

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This study shed light on blends as a distinctive type of complex words, not only regarding their lexical specificity, but also due to their resemblance to pseudowords during processing. Thus, these findings contribute to advancing our comprehension of morphological processing from both theoretical and empirical perspectives on Portuguese blends which can be extended to other languages.

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