An Extra Cue Is Beneficial for Native Speakers but Can Be Disruptive for Second Language Learners: Integration of Prosody and Visual Context in Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution
It has long been debated whether non-native speakers can process sentences in the same way as native speakers do or they suffer from certain qualitative deficit in their ability of language comprehension. The current study examined the influence of prosodic and visual information in processing sente...
| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Frontiers Media SA
2020
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| Online Access: | https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/125796 |
| _version_ | 1811074492606185472 |
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| author | Nakamura, Chie Arai, Manabu Hirose, Yuki Flynn, Suzanne |
| author2 | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Linguistics and Philosophy |
| author_facet | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Linguistics and Philosophy Nakamura, Chie Arai, Manabu Hirose, Yuki Flynn, Suzanne |
| author_sort | Nakamura, Chie |
| collection | MIT |
| description | It has long been debated whether non-native speakers can process sentences in the same way as native speakers do or they suffer from certain qualitative deficit in their ability of language comprehension. The current study examined the influence of prosodic and visual information in processing sentences with a temporarily ambiguous prepositional phrase (“Put the cake on the plate in the basket”) with native English speakers and Japanese learners of English. Specifically, we investigated (1) whether native speakers assign different pragmatic functions to the same prosodic cues used in different contexts and (2) whether L2 learners can reach the correct analysis by integrating prosodic cues with syntax with reference to the visually presented contextual information. The results from native speakers showed that contrastive accents helped to resolve the referential ambiguity when a contrastive pair was present in visual scenes. However, without a contrastive pair in the visual scene, native speakers were slower to reach the correct analysis with the contrastive accent, which supports the view that the pragmatic function of intonation categories are highly context dependent. The results from L2 learners showed that visually presented context alone helped L2 learners to reach the correct analysis. However, L2 learners were unable to assign contrastive meaning to the prosodic cues when there were two potential referents in the visual scene. The results suggest that L2 learners are not capable of integrating multiple sources of information in an interactive manner during real-time language comprehension. © Copyright ©2020 Nakamura, Arai, Hirose and Flynn. |
| first_indexed | 2024-09-23T09:50:18Z |
| format | Article |
| id | mit-1721.1/125796 |
| institution | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| language | English |
| last_indexed | 2024-09-23T09:50:18Z |
| publishDate | 2020 |
| publisher | Frontiers Media SA |
| record_format | dspace |
| spelling | mit-1721.1/1257962022-09-26T14:03:22Z An Extra Cue Is Beneficial for Native Speakers but Can Be Disruptive for Second Language Learners: Integration of Prosody and Visual Context in Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution Nakamura, Chie Arai, Manabu Hirose, Yuki Flynn, Suzanne Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Linguistics and Philosophy It has long been debated whether non-native speakers can process sentences in the same way as native speakers do or they suffer from certain qualitative deficit in their ability of language comprehension. The current study examined the influence of prosodic and visual information in processing sentences with a temporarily ambiguous prepositional phrase (“Put the cake on the plate in the basket”) with native English speakers and Japanese learners of English. Specifically, we investigated (1) whether native speakers assign different pragmatic functions to the same prosodic cues used in different contexts and (2) whether L2 learners can reach the correct analysis by integrating prosodic cues with syntax with reference to the visually presented contextual information. The results from native speakers showed that contrastive accents helped to resolve the referential ambiguity when a contrastive pair was present in visual scenes. However, without a contrastive pair in the visual scene, native speakers were slower to reach the correct analysis with the contrastive accent, which supports the view that the pragmatic function of intonation categories are highly context dependent. The results from L2 learners showed that visually presented context alone helped L2 learners to reach the correct analysis. However, L2 learners were unable to assign contrastive meaning to the prosodic cues when there were two potential referents in the visual scene. The results suggest that L2 learners are not capable of integrating multiple sources of information in an interactive manner during real-time language comprehension. © Copyright ©2020 Nakamura, Arai, Hirose and Flynn. JSPS KAKENHI Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research (Grant no. 15H05381) 2020-06-15T16:28:56Z 2020-06-15T16:28:56Z 2020-01 2019-03 2020-03-30T13:29:05Z Article http://purl.org/eprint/type/JournalArticle 1664-1078 https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/125796 Nakamura, Chie et al., "An Extra Cue Is Beneficial for Native Speakers but Can Be Disruptive for Second Language Learners: Integration of Prosody and Visual Context in Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution." Frontiers in Psychology 10 (January 2020): no. 2835 doi. 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02835 ©2020 Authors en https://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02835 Frontiers in Psychology Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ application/pdf Frontiers Media SA Frontiers |
| spellingShingle | Nakamura, Chie Arai, Manabu Hirose, Yuki Flynn, Suzanne An Extra Cue Is Beneficial for Native Speakers but Can Be Disruptive for Second Language Learners: Integration of Prosody and Visual Context in Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution |
| title | An Extra Cue Is Beneficial for Native Speakers but Can Be Disruptive for Second Language Learners: Integration of Prosody and Visual Context in Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution |
| title_full | An Extra Cue Is Beneficial for Native Speakers but Can Be Disruptive for Second Language Learners: Integration of Prosody and Visual Context in Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution |
| title_fullStr | An Extra Cue Is Beneficial for Native Speakers but Can Be Disruptive for Second Language Learners: Integration of Prosody and Visual Context in Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution |
| title_full_unstemmed | An Extra Cue Is Beneficial for Native Speakers but Can Be Disruptive for Second Language Learners: Integration of Prosody and Visual Context in Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution |
| title_short | An Extra Cue Is Beneficial for Native Speakers but Can Be Disruptive for Second Language Learners: Integration of Prosody and Visual Context in Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution |
| title_sort | extra cue is beneficial for native speakers but can be disruptive for second language learners integration of prosody and visual context in syntactic ambiguity resolution |
| url | https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/125796 |
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