Questões de Linguagens do ENEM

    SPEAKING two languages rather than just one has obvious practical benefits in an increasingly globalized world. But in recent years, scientists have begun to show that the advantages of bilingualism are even more fundamental than being able to converse with a wider range of people. Being bilingual, it turns out, makes you smarter. It can have a profound effect on your brain, improving cognitive skills not related to language and even shielding against dementia in old age. 

     This view of bilingualism is remarkably different from the understanding of bilingualism through much of the 20th century. Researchers, educators and policy makers long considered a second language to be an interference, cognitively speaking, that hindered a child’s academic and intellectual development. 

    They were not wrong about the interference: there is ample evidence that in a bilingual’s brain both language systems are active even when he is using only one language, thus creating situations in which one system obstructs the other. But this interference, researchers are finding out, isn’t so much a handicap as a blessing in disguise. It forces the brain to resolve internal conflict, giving the mind a workout that strengthens its cognitive muscles. 

    Bilinguals, for instance, seem to be more adept than monolinguals at solving certain kinds of mental puzzles. In a 2004 study by the psychologists Ellen Bialystok and Michelle MartinRhee, bilingual and monolingual preschoolers were asked to sort blue circles and red squares presented on a computer screen into two digital bins — one marked with a blue square and the other marked with a red circle. 

    In the first task, the children had to sort the shapes by color, placing blue circles in the bin marked with the blue square and red squares in the bin marked with the red circle. Both groups did this with comparable ease. Next, the children were asked to sort by shape, which was more challenging because it required placing the images in a bin marked with a conflicting color. The bilinguals were quicker at performing this task. 

    The collective evidence from a number of such studies suggests that the bilingual experience improves the brain’s so-called executive function — a command system that directs the attention processes that we use for planning, solving problems and performing various other mentally demanding tasks. These processes include ignoring distractions to stay focused, switching attention willfully from one thing to another and holding information in mind — like remembering a sequence of directions while driving.

    Why does the tussle between two simultaneously active language systems improve these aspects of cognition? Until recently, researchers thought the bilingual advantage stemmed primarily from an ability for inhibition that was honed by the exercise of suppressing one language system: this suppression, it was thought, would help train the bilingual mind to ignore distractions in other contexts. But that explanation increasingly appears to be inadequate, since studies have shown that bilinguals perform better than monolinguals even at tasks that do not require inhibition, like threading a line through an ascending series of numbers scattered randomly on a page.

    The key difference between bilinguals and monolinguals may be more basic: a heightened ability to monitor the environment. “Bilinguals have to switch languages quite often — you may talk to your father in one language and to your mother in another language,” says Albert Costa, a researcher at the University of PompeuFabra in Spain. “It requires keeping track of changes around you in the same way that we monitor our surroundings when driving.” In a study comparing German-Italian bilinguals with Italian monolinguals on monitoring tasks, Mr. Costa and his colleagues found that the bilingual subjects not only performed better, but they also did so with less activity in parts of the brain involved in monitoring, indicating that they were more efficient at it. 

    The bilingual experience appears to influence the brain from infancy to old age (and there is reason to believe that it may also apply to those who learn a second language later in life). 

    In a 2009 study led by Agnes Kovacs of the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy, 7-month-old babies exposed to two languages from birth were compared with peers raised with one language. In an initial set of trials, the infants were presented with an audio cue and then shown a puppet on one side of a screen. Both infant groups learned to look at that side of the screen in anticipation of the puppet. But in a later set of trials, when the puppet began appearing on the opposite side of the screen, the babies exposed to a bilingual environment quickly learned to switch their anticipatory gaze in the new direction while the other babies did not. 

    Bilingualism’s effects also extend into the twilight years. In a recent study of 44 elderly Spanish-English bilinguals, scientists led by the neuropsychologist Tamar Gollan of the University of California, San Diego, found that individuals with a higher degree of bilingualism — measured through a comparative evaluation of proficiency in each language — were more resistant than others to the onset of dementia and other symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease: the higher the degree of bilingualism, the later the age of onset.

    Nobody ever doubted the power of language. But who would have imagined that the words we hear and the sentences we speak might be leaving such a deep imprint? 

Source: www.nytimes.com

Choose the alternative that correctly fills the blanks in the following question.

The bilingual children not only had a better performance, but____________ less resources from the brain in order to do the task.

Pode-se definir “metalinguagem” como a linguagem que comenta a própria linguagem, fenômeno presente na literatura e nas artes em geral.

O quadro A perspicácia, do belga René Magritte, é um exemplo de metalinguagem porque:

O quadro produz um estranhamento em relação ao que se poderia esperar de um pintor que observa um modelo para sua obra.

Esse estranhamento contribui para a reflexão principalmente sobre o seguinte aspecto da criação artística:

Pode ser que essas suposições tenham algo de utópico, (l. 17)

Neste fragmento, a expressão em destaque é empregada para formar um conhecido recurso da argumentação.

Esse recurso pode ser definido como:

Mais perto do senso comum, (l. 25)

A expressão que inicia o trecho transcrito acima introduz uma comparação em relação ao comentário anterior, feito por Décio Pignatari.

O emprego da expressão comparativa revela que o autor considera o exemplo dos filmes de cowboy como algo que teria a seguinte caracterização:

Na coesão textual, ocorre o que se chama catáfora quando um termo se refere a algo que ainda vai ser enunciado na frase.

Um exemplo em que o termo destacado constrói uma catáfora é:

A linguagem poética inverte essa relação, pois, vindo a se tornar, ela em si, coisa, oferece uma via de acesso sensível mais direto entre nós e o mundo. (l. 31-32)

O vocábulo destacado estabelece uma relação de sentido com o que está enunciado antes. Essa relação de sentido pode ser definida como:

referencialidade. (l. 35)

Na frase acima, o emprego das palavras “oásis” e “deserto” configura uma superposição de figuras de linguagem, recurso frequente em textos artísticos.

As figuras de linguagem superpostas na frase são:

Assinale a alternativa que NÃO apresenta uso de linguagem figurada.

Considere as seguintes afirmações:

I. O texto faz implicitamente uma crítica ao Carnaval dos nossos tempos, concentrados no luxo televisivo e espetacular das dispendiosas escolas de samba.
II. O narrador observa, nostalgicamente, velhos tempos carnavalescos da cidade carioca, quando imperava a alegria das marchinhas e do Carnaval de rua.
III. A leveza das letras e ritmo das marchinhas são contrapostos a um ritmo pesado e nada leve dos sambas-enredo atuais.

Assinale:

Considerado o contexto, todas as alternativas traduzem adequadamente o sentido do termo em destaque, EXCETO:

Considerado o contexto, todas as alternativas explicam adequadamente a expressão extraída do fragmento, EXCETO:

Considere os seguintes traços de estilo:

I. Evidência de metáforas na composição do discurso descritivo.
II. Marca linguística que denuncia a presença do interlocutor no texto.
III. Sinais explícitos de reflexão metalinguística, ou seja, discurso que tematiza o próprio fazer literário.

No texto,

The truth about videogames, please!

Gustavo Dudamel is the Elvis of the orchestra world, and he has the sold-out concerts to prove it. Meet the L.A. Philharmonic conductor who’s bridging the generation gap – and saving classical music.

The pronoun who in “80% of those who are blind don’t have to be” can be replaced by