Spanish and portuguese 'heterotônicos' in the field of medicine

Abstract

This work is integrated into a project whose objective is to carry out a typological study of false friends in Portuguese and Spanish, and to create specific educational material intended to make their acquisition easier and avoid the interference which the process of learning Portuguese as a foreign language can cause. In this article we propose a classification of 'heterotônicos', that is to say, words which are the same, in both form and meaning, in Portuguese and Spanish, with the stressed syllable in a different position in each language. In the last few decades, the studies which have been carried out on the teaching and learning of vocabulary highlight the advantages of making associative networks as an educational strategy for developing lexical competence. Following semantic and morphological criteria of association, we have created a lexical repertoire of 'heterotônicos' terms belonging to the area of health sciences.