Abstract
How do speakers of languages with different intonation systems produce and perceive prosodic junctures in sentences with identical structural ambiguity? Native speakers of English and of Mandarin produced potentially ambiguous sentences with a prosodic juncture either earlier in the utterance (e.g., “He gave her # dog biscuits,” “他给她#狗饼干 ”), or later (e.g., “He gave her dog # biscuits,” “他给她狗 #饼干 ”). These productiondata showed that prosodic disambiguation is realised very similarly in the two languages, despite some differences in the degree to which individual juncture cues (e.g., pausing) were favoured. In perception experiments with a new disambiguation task, requiring speeded responses to select the correct meaning for structurally ambiguous sentences, language differences in disambiguation response time appeared: Mandarin speakers correctly disambiguated sentences with earlier juncture faster than those with later juncture, while English speakers showed the reverse. Mandarin-speakers with L2 English did not show their native-language response time pattern when they heard the English ambiguous sentences. Thus even with identical structural ambiguity and identically cued production, prosodic juncture perception across languages can differ.
Highlights
The main aims of our statistical analyses were to investigate (1) whether response time (RT) differed across juncture version (i.e., Early versus Late Juncture) and (2) whether the pattern of this RT difference varied across languages and experimental trials
To address (2), we performed statistical tests on the RT data to examine whether there was an interaction between language groups and juncture version, and to address (1), we performed separate analyses for the English and Mandarin datasets
We examined the effect of juncture version (Early versus Late Juncture), language (English versus Mandarin), and language by juncture version interaction
Summary
A vast repository of words and an infinite range of sentences are based on just a handful of phonemes and syntactic rules. Different levels of prosodic constituents can govern the prominence relations and intonational, rhythmic, and pausing patterns in the speech signal (e.g., Beckman, 1996; Ladd, 1986; Liberman & Prince, 1977; Selkirk, 2003), and from birth, language learners can attend to the prosodic cues that correspond to these levels to detect relevant boundaries (Johnson, 2016). In this respect, prosodic cues to juncture can be seen as a skeletal foundation for integrating different aspects of speech during the early stages of sentence processing (Frazier, Carlson, & Clifton, 2006)
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