Asymmetry in L1 and L2 listeners’ use of prosody for PP-attachment disambiguation

Yuanyuan Zhang, Hongwei Ding

    Research output: Chapter in Book / Conference PaperConference Paperpeer-review

    Abstract

    The role of prosody in sentence processing has received little attention in L2 spoken-language comprehension research, and studies of prosodic disambiguation of PP-attachment ambiguity by L2 learners are rare. We investigated the effects of prosody (accompanied by visual context from the pictures) on PP-attachment ambiguity resolution by native Australian English speakers and Chinese-speaking learners of English, comparing their attachment preferences to examine L1-L2 sentence processing differences. Our results show that prosody can guide both native speakers and L2 learners towards the resolution of sentence-level ambiguity. However, the observed effects varied. For native speakers, prosody overrode bias for the NP-attachment induced by the visual context; L2 learners in contrast showed a preference for the VP-attachment independent of prosodic cues, indicating that they did not detect the ambiguity within the structure from the visual context and that it is difficult for them to effectively integrate different domains of information in ambiguity resolution. These L1-L2 differences might reflect L2 learners’ limited processing capacity for detecting ambiguity and integrating multiple domains of information during L2 sentence processing.

    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationProceedings of the 11th International Conference on Speech Prosody
    Subtitle of host publicationSpeech Prosody 2022 Lisbon, Portugal 23-26 May 2022
    EditorsSónia Frota, Marisa Cruz, Marina Vigário
    PublisherInternational Speech Communication Association
    Pages659-663
    Number of pages5
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - May 2022
    Event11th International Conference on Speech Prosody, Speech Prosody 2022 - Lisbon, Portugal
    Duration: 23 May 202226 May 2022

    Publication series

    NameProceedings of the International Conference on Speech Prosody
    PublisherInternational Speech Communication Association
    ISSN (Print)2333-2042

    Conference

    Conference11th International Conference on Speech Prosody, Speech Prosody 2022
    Country/TerritoryPortugal
    CityLisbon
    Period23/05/2226/05/22

    Bibliographical note

    Publisher Copyright:
    © 2022 International Speech Communications Association. All rights reserved.

    Keywords

    • L2 learners
    • PP-attachment ambiguity
    • prosody
    • sentence processing
    • syntax

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