An Extra Cue Is Beneficial for Native Speakers but Can Be Disruptive for Second Language Learners: Integration of Prosody and Visual Context in Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution

Abstract

It has long been debated whether non-native speakers can process sentences in the same way as native speakers do or they suffer from certain qualitative deficit in their ability of language comprehension. The current study examined the influence of prosodic and visual information in processing sentences with a temporarily ambiguous prepositional phrase ("Put the cake on the plate in the basket") with native English speakers and Japanese learners of English. Specifically, we investigated (1) whether native speakers assign different pragmatic functions to the same prosodic cues used in different contexts and (2) whether L2 learners can reach the correct analysis by integrating prosodic cues with syntax with reference to the visually presented contextual information. The results from native speakers showed that contrastive accents helped to resolve the referential ambiguity when a contrastive pair was present in visual scenes. However, without a contrastive pair in the visual scene, native speakers were slower to reach the correct analysis with the contrastive accent, which supports the view that the pragmatic function of intonation categories are highly context dependent. The results from L2 learners showed that visually presented context alone helped L2 learners to reach the correct analysis. However, L2 learners were unable to assign contrastive meaning to the prosodic cues when there were two potential referents in the visual scene. The results suggest that L2 learners are not capable of integrating multiple sources of information in an interactive manner during real-time language comprehension.

The Effect of Ambiguity Awareness on Second Language Learners’ Prosodic Disambiguation

“…If the low accuracy rate was attributed to the learners’ low sensitivity to prosodic cues, then they would have the same difficulty to determine the other interpretation, which contradicts with their performance. Therefore, we argue that the participants’ preference for the NP-attachment may come from the fact that they had difficulty in integrating prosodic information to syntactic structure properly, as has been suggested in the Interface Hypothesis ( Ying, 1996 ; Sorace and Serratrice, 2009 ; Nakamura et al, 2016 , 2020 ).…”

“…However, there were still some participants who could not shift their original parsing bias or reversed their bias from one interpretation toward the other one. We have argued that this may come from their difficulty in integrating prosodic information to syntactic structure ( Roberts et al, 2008 ; Sorace and Serratrice, 2009 ; Nakamura et al, 2016 , 2020 ).…”

“…A further study found that L2 learners displayed different processing strategies even when their L1 and L2 had identical ambiguity and disambiguation patterns, suggesting that L2 learners’ parsing strategy has to be learned anew ( Ip and Cutler, 2018 ). In addition, the learners might be less able to integrate prosodic information to other domains of information compared to native speakers ( Nakamura et al, 2016 , 2020 ). The above findings indicate that L2 learners’ ambiguity resolution can be constrained by linguistic and nonlinguistic information, and the L1–L2 differences in prosodic disambiguation can be attributed to a variety of factors, such as L2 proficiency, L1 background, low sensitivity to prosodic cues, and difficulty in information integration.…”

Adaptation in Predictive Prosodic Processing in Bilinguals

“…In contrast, the available evidence suggests that L2 listeners do not always use contrastive pitch accents to predict upcoming referents (Klassen, 2015;Namjoshi, 2015;Takeda, 2018;Perdomo and Kaan, 2019;Foltz, 2020;Nakamura et al, 2020). Most relevantly for the current study, Foltz (2020) tested German-English bilingual listeners' processing of contrastive pitch accents in both of their languages.…”

Implicit Causality and Consequentiality and Effect of Pronoun Resolution/Quality of Use among EFL Learners

“…How language users interpret pronouns is an area of research that has been explored to greater heights and perspectives. Most of these studies, as such, have been directed and focused on understanding as well as explaining strategies that individuals use in identifying pronominal referents (Nakamura, Arai, Hirose, & Flynn, 2019). Conventionally, how individuals interpret pronouns ,is influenced by the link between referring expressions and accessibility or salience of their antecedents (Cunnings, Fotiadou&Tsimpli, 2017).…”