Do L1-L2 Differences in Discourse Processing Reflect Processing Demands or Difficulty of Form-Function Mapping?

Abstract

We examined what causes L1-L2 differences in sensitivity to prominence cues in discourse processing. Participants listened to recorded stories in segment-by-segment fashion at their own pace. Each story established a pair of contrasting items, and one item from the pair was rementioned and manipulated to carry either a contrastive or presentational pitch accent. By directly comparing the current self-paced listening data to previously obtained experimenter-paced listening data, we tested whether reducing online-processing demands allows L2 learners to show a nativelike behavior, such that contrastive pitch accents facilitate later ruling out the salient alternative. However, reduced time pressure failed to lead even higher proficiency L1-Korean learners of English to reach a nativelike level, suggesting that L2 learners’ nonnativelike processing and representation of the prominence cue in spoken discourse processing can be due to the inherent difficulty of fully learning a complex form-function mapping rather than to online-processing demands.

Mapping Pitch Accents to Memory Representations in Spoken Discourse Among Chinese Learners of English: Effects of L2 Proficiency and Working Memory

“…Contrastive PAs helped L2 learners reject the unmentioned item that was never part of the discourse, but they impaired L2 learners’ ability to discriminate between the correct item and its salient alternative. This finding replicates previous studies among a different population of L2 English learners whose L1 was Korean ( Lee and Fraundorf, 2017 , 2021 ). Second, we found a significant interaction effect of proficiency by contrastive PA.…”

“…These results replicate those of previous studies of L1-Korean L2-English undergraduates ( Lee and Fraundorf, 2017 , 2021 ). Notably, however, we replicate them in a population with a different L1 (Chinese) and with a wider age range (from high school to graduate study).…”

“…That is, the correct and the contrastive alternatives are easy to tease apart among L1 listeners, but not among L2 speakers because both pieces of information exist in L2 listeners’ memory with less degree of certainty about which was originally stated. This is what has been found with L1-Korean speakers learning L2-English ( Lee and Fraundorf, 2017 , 2021 ), suggesting that L2 learners do not process PA cues the same way as native speakers.…”

“…With respect to the above memory task probing the effect of prosody on long-term discourse representations, Lee and Fraundorf (2017 , 2021) found dramatically different patterns among L1-Korean college students learning L2-English. Low- and mid- proficiency learners (as defined by scores on a cloze task) showed no memory benefit whatsoever from contrastive PAs.…”

“…L2 listeners adopt different prosodic processing strategies or mechanisms than L1 listeners ( Pennington and Ellis, 2000 ; Akker and Cutler, 2003 ; Baker, 2010 ; Braun and Tagliapietra, 2011 ). When prosodic cues match the content of speech, they enhance L2 speakers’ discourse comprehension and memory ( Lee and Fraundorf, 2019 , 2021 ). For L1 speakers, when prosodic cues fail to match the content of speech, they interfere with discourse content and memory ( Harrington, 1992 ; van den Noort et al, 2006 ; Morett and Fraundorf, 2019 ; Morett et al, 2020 , 2021 ).…”