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Abstract
Three tasks were reported to examine the effect of ambiguity awareness on Chinese-speaking English learners’ use of prosody in resolving prepositional-phrase attachment ambiguity. In the first (Task 1) and second (Task 2) tasks, listeners were not informed of the syntactic ambiguity. In the third task (Task 3), listeners were given the specific information about syntactic ambiguity. The analysis of the overall accuracy rate showed that before receiving specific information about syntactic ambiguity, learners did not detect the ambiguity within the structure and tended to interpret the sentence in a “good-enough” heuristic to reduce the computational burden. After being aware of the syntactic ambiguity, they could use prosodic cues to resolve the ambiguity. However, the finding that the learners reversed their parsing bias from verb phrase attachment (VP-attachment) toward noun phrase attachment (NP-attachment) indicated their difficulty in integrating prosodic information to syntactic structure efficiently. The analysis of individual accuracy rate demonstrated learners’ individual variations in using prosodic cues. The result suggests that learners’ failure to use prosodic cues may be attributed to a lack of ambiguity awareness and difficulty in information integration, rather than their low sensitivity to prosodic cues.
Highlights
Syntactic ambiguity has been widely studied in both native (L1) and second languages (L2) to investigate sentence parsing strategies
This finding suggests that participants could employ prosodic cues to identify the intended meaning of the ambiguous sentences after they were informed of the ambiguity
Our primary purpose is to decide what results in L2 learners’ failure to utilize prosodic cues in L2 syntactic ambiguity resolution and in particular to examine the effect of ambiguity awareness
Summary
Syntactic ambiguity has been widely studied in both native (L1) and second languages (L2) to investigate sentence parsing strategies. Previous studies have reported that the learner’s failure to use prosodic cues may result from various factors, such as their low sensitivity to prosodic cues, difficulty in integrating multiple sources of information, L2 proficiency, etc There is another possibility that the learners’ unawareness of the ambiguity within the structure leads to their failure to fully analyze the structure. They tend to interpret the ambiguous structure in a “good-enough” heuristic, ignoring a deeper reanalysis of the structure that is consistent with the available prosodic cues, leading to their failure to use prosodic cues If they still could not resolve syntactic ambiguity with prosody even after they were aware of the ambiguity, their analysis of the ambiguous sentences may be constrained by other factors, such as low sensitivity to prosodic cues and difficulty in information integration
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