Discrepant Prosodic Effects on PP-Attachment Ambiguity Processing by L1 and L2 Listeners

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Second Language Acquisition
• Computational Linguistics

Background:

• Prosody significantly impacts first language (L1) sentence processing.
• Limited understanding exists on how second language (L2) learners utilize prosodic cues.

Purpose of the Study:

• Investigate prosody's role in resolving prepositional phrase (PP) attachment ambiguity in English.
• Compare L2 learners' (Chinese speakers) and native speakers' use of prosody and visual context.

Main Methods:

• Analyzed attachment preferences and reaction times of native English speakers and Chinese L2 learners.
• Assessed how prosodic and visual cues influence sentence processing.

Main Results:

• Native speakers effectively used prosody to resolve PP-attachment ambiguity, even with conflicting visual cues.
• Chinese L2 learners consistently preferred verb phrase attachment, relying on structure-based parsing.

Conclusions:

• Native speakers integrate prosodic and contextual information for efficient sentence processing.
• L2 learners face challenges in coordinating multiple information sources like prosody and visual context.
• L2 sentence processing may be more reliant on syntactic structure than prosodic cues.