Effects of prosodic focus on discourse processing by native speakers versus second language learners

Abstract

The acquisition of sentence-level prosody and intonation is often challenging for second language learners (L2ers). A speaker’s native and second language can differ at several levels of representation involved in the use of prosody, and so multiple new mappings must be acquired for proficiency in the second language’s prosodic system. This talk examines prosodic focus in English, Japanese, and Korean, and its effects on discourse processing by native speakers and L2ers. Although all three languages make use of prosodic focus, and draw on some of the same acoustic cues to realize it, there are also substantial differences across the languages in how prosodic focus interfaces with other grammatical components. Results from a series of experiments indicate context-sensitivity in how L2ers respond to prosodic focus, showing native-like responses in one discourse context but quite different responses to the same tonal realization in another context. Such findings point to the importance of testing the perception of prosody across multiple grammatical configurations, particularly when investigating language acquisition.