L2 speakers’ recognition memory for English sentences with prosodic cues

Abstract

This study investigated L2 learners’ recognition memory for English sentences with prosodic cues and examined the effect of English proficiency on recognition memory for English prosody. Twenty Korean L1 speakers and ten English L1 speakers participated in two tasks. The Korean L1 speakers were grouped according to their proficiency level: 10 each for high and low proficiency level. In a discrimination task, participants’ attention was explicitly focused on the contrasts in prosody and the associated differences in meaning, followed by a recognition task that tested whether prosodic cues were used to recognize the sentences. The results demonstrated that high-proficiency L2 speakers of English were better at using prosodic cues to interpret spoken sentences and remembering their meaning accordingly than low-proficiency L2 speakers. High-proficiency L2 speakers showed better recognition memory of the prosodic content of English sentences than for their lexis, while low-proficiency L2 speakers were better with the lexical content than prosodic cues. Native speakers and high-proficiency L2 speakers of English did not differ in recognizing meaning differences cued by prosody. However, high-proficiency L2 speakers of English were significantly worse at rejecting sentences containing lexis that they had not heard than L1 speakers.