Abstract

Several studies have found that the presence of L+H* accent on a contrastive adjective assists native-speaking listeners in narrowing the referent of the noun following the adjective (e.g., Ito & Speer 2008, Weber et al. 2006). Our study addresses two questions: whether non-native speakers use prosodic cues in processing, as previous studies have shown for native speakers, and whether there is a relationship between the use of prosodic cues in processing and in production. Twenty-one Mandarin speakers living in the US and twenty-one native English speakers participated in two tasks investigating their processing and production of prosodic cues to contrastive focus. In the processing task, participants responded to the same recorded instruction containing an accented adjective in different contexts, in which the adjective was either contrastive (and therefore appropriately accented) or was repeated and followed by a contrasting noun, making focus accent on the adjective inappropriate. In the production task, participants guided an experimenter to place colored objects on a whiteboard, with some contexts designed to elicit contrastive focus. Overall results indicate that the Mandarin speakers made use of prosodic cues in both processing and production, although their focus prosody production differed from that of native speakers in several respects. Comparison of the results in the two experiments did not find strong correlations between processing and production. These results suggest that there is considerable heterogeneity even among native speakers in the use of prosodic cues in processing and production, and even those who do not use prosodic cues in processing may use them in production.

Highlights

  • Many languages, including English, use prosodic cues of pitch, intensity, and duration to focus specific information (e.g., Ito & Speer 2008)

  • Because languages differ in the means used to signal focus, use of prosodic cues is frequently problematic for second language (L2) learners of languages such as English, for whom non-nativelike use of prosody has been linked to decreased intelligibility of L2 speech (e.g., Anderson-Hsieh & Koehler 1988, Hahn 2004, Munro & Derwing 1995, Sereno et al 2016)

  • The experiments conducted for the current study investigated non-native speakers’ use of L2 English contrastive focus prosody in processing and its relationship with prosodic cues in English contrastive focus prosody production

Read more

Summary

Introduction

Many languages, including English, use prosodic cues of pitch, intensity, and duration to focus specific information (e.g., Ito & Speer 2008). In studies examining processing in English and in German, the felicitous use of prosodic cues to contrastive focus was found to facilitate faster recognition and better retention (e.g., Ito & Speer 2008, Sedivy et al 1995, Weber et al 2006). While earlier work has revealed that non-native speakers’ use of prosody in production differs from that of native speakers in factors such as the realization of pitch peak, intensity, and duration (e.g., Chen et al 2013, Graham & Post 2017, Kao et al 2016), there is a paucity of studies that examine non-native speakers’ use of prosodic cues in processing as well as studies investigating the processing-production link in native and non-native speakers. We further investigate the relationship between the use of prosodic cues in production and processing in both language groups

Objectives
Methods
Results
Conclusion
Full Text
Published version (Free)

Talk to us

Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have

Schedule a call