The processing of the definite article in Brazilian Portuguese: When ‘the’ carries gender and number marking

Research on eye movements during reading has shown that function words receive fewer and shorter fixations than content words. However, recent studies suggest that when matched in frequency, length, and predictability, such differences disappear. Two studies in English still indicate a special status of the article 'the'. Angele and Rayner, using the gaze-contingent boundary paradigm, found that ungrammatical previews of 'the' were skipped more often than grammatical content words, while Staub et al. found that repeated articles were noticed less often than repeated content words. We extended both studies to Brazilian Portuguese (BP), where articles carry more syntactic information (gender and number) than in English. In a gaze-contingent boundary experiment, we found that the preview of an ungrammatical definite article was skipped more often than the grammatical continuation, suggesting the mechanism of automatically skipping articles is also present in BP. Because this mechanism does not seem to be influenced by the extra information articles carry in BP compared to English, it is likely that it is the high frequency of the articles that is triggering word skipping as opposed to a special function word status. However, in the second experiment, repeated articles were noticed nearly as frequently as content words, presumably because the additional syntactic information articles carry in BP is connected to the sentence's structure in a more complex way than, for instance, English. So, in an artificial task, such as repetition detection during reading, differences between articles and content words can manifest themselves.