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.

Chie Nakamura,Yuki Hirose,Manabu Arai,Suzanne Flynn

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02835

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.

Highlights

It is known that the human language comprehension system rapidly integrates both linguistic and non-linguistic information in forming sentence representations (e.g., Tanenhaus et al, 1995)
The current study focuses on these two prosodic features (H∗ or L + H∗) and investigated how these types of pitch accents are processed within particular visual context by native speakers and L2 learners
Our results demonstrated that a visually presented context is helpful for processing ambiguous syntactic structures for both native speakers and L2 learners

Summary

Introduction

It is known that the human language comprehension system rapidly integrates both linguistic and non-linguistic information in forming sentence representations (e.g., Tanenhaus et al, 1995). Studies that investigated the immediate use of prosody have demonstrated that listeners adopt different sentence representations by quickly considering prosodic features and visually presented context information (Ito and Speer, 2008; Nakamura et al, 2012). These studies indicate that comprehenders can use and integrate multiple sources of information such as visual and auditory information to resolve structural ambiguities during real-time comprehension. We are interested in revealing whether the L2 processing is fundamentally different in some way from native speakers, or are L2 learners slower and less accurate compared to native speakers because their L2 competence is underdeveloped?

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion