Prosodic cue weighting in the processing of ambiguous sentences by native English listeners and Korean listeners of English.

Abstract

Differences in the perception of segmental contrasts by native and non-native listeners have been analyzed as the results of language-specific weightings of acoustic cues in their perception grammar [e.g., Escudero and Boersma, Stud. Second Lang. Acquis. 26, 551-585 (2004)]. However, less attention has been paid to the weighting of prosodic cues. This study investigated the relative importance of four prosodic cues-word duration, pauses, pitch, and intensity-in the resolution of English syntactic ambiguity by native English listeners and Korean learners of English. In a forced-choice processing task, English listeners' disambiguation relied most heavily on pitch, followed by pause and intensity cues, whereas pauses were the only heavily weighted cue for Korean listeners, indicating an influence from their native language. Moreover, Korean listeners' use of prosody for disambiguation was found to be influenced by their age of English acquisition and English proficiency.