ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2024
ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2024

Incremental Processing of Prosody in L2: A Visual World experiment with French learners of English

Chie Nakamura, Hiyon Yoo, Giuseppina Turco

Native listeners rely on prosodic cues for the resolution of syntactic ambiguity at very early stage of online sentence processing. In the current study we test whether a similar mechanism is shared by second language (L2) listeners. In a visual word paradigm experiment, we used sentences with PP attachment ambiguity such as The boy will write to the panda with the crayon and tested French learners of L2 English. We examined the impact of the prosodic boundary that was placed either before or after the patient NP (e.g., the boy will write to % the panda with the crayon, or the boy will write to the panda % with the crayon). Results show that learners are able to integrate prosodic boundary information for the resolution of syntactic ambiguity but at a delayed time than natives. These findings corroborate previous work testing a different L2 population (i.e. L1-Japanese L2-English), thereby suggesting that general mechanisms drive parsing decisions for L2 learners, even when L1/L2 pairs exploit similar prosodic cues to locate boundary information.