FORM AND CONTENT ANOMALIES IN BRAZILIAN PORTUGUESE: A PRELIMINARY EYE-TRACKING STUDY OF READING AND ACCEPTABILITY EVALUATION

Abstract The present study uses the eye tracking methodology to investigate to what extent the reading of sentences in Brazilian Portuguese may differ in relation to grammatical and semantic anomalies and how these sentences are evaluated for their good formation, taking as control syntactically and semantically well-formed sentences. The analyses of the on-line data, allowed us to identify that sentences that present anomalous number agreement features in the object noun phrase are more costly in terms of fixation and refixation patterns than the semantic anomalous sentences, even though they may be better accepted by educated speakers in the off-line measure than sentences with semantic anomalies. It is argued that the results provide evidence in favor of structural models of sentence processing.