Prosody facilitates learning the word order in a new language

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Cognitive Science
• Speech Perception

Background:

• Infants and language learners extract linguistic regularities from speech input via perceptual tuning.
• Prosodic regularities in speech, such as word prominence, are linked to syntactic structures like basic word order (VO or OV).
• The role of prosody in second language (L2) acquisition, particularly vocabulary learning and the influence of rhythmic familiarity, remains underexplored.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether prosodic information aids adult L2 learners in extracting syntactic structure and learning vocabulary.
• To determine if familiarity with a language's rhythmic structure is necessary to leverage prosody for learning.
• To examine how native language prosody influences the learning of artificial languages with native-like (VO) versus non-native (OV) word orders.

Main Methods:

• Adult Spanish and Italian speakers learned words from an artificial language with either VO or OV word order.
• Prosodic cues (duration, pitch) were manipulated to signal word prominence.
• Learners' ability to identify prominent words and learn vocabulary was assessed under varying conditions of prosodic familiarity and word order.

Main Results:

• Learners successfully used duration-based prosody to identify prominent words and learn vocabulary in a VO artificial language similar to their native language.
• When the artificial language featured pitch-based prominence and non-native OV word order, prominent word learning occurred only after three days of exposure.
• Repeated exposure to non-native prosody facilitated new word learning in adult L2 learners, indicating a role for familiarity.

Conclusions:

• Prosodic cues, particularly duration, can facilitate word order and vocabulary learning in L2 acquisition when aligned with native language patterns.
• Familiarity with rhythmic structures is crucial for L2 learners to effectively utilize prosodic information, especially when encountering non-native patterns.
• Prosody plays a significant role in L2 learning, with repeated exposure enabling the extraction of linguistic information even from unfamiliar rhythmic and syntactic structures.