Prosodic prominence and clefting in L2 focus interpretation

Abstract

Speech cues available in the utterance can guide the listener to the most important information (focus) and thus facilitate discourse comprehension. It has long been established that prosodic prominence plays an important role in the search for focus in a variety of languages including Mandarin and English; however, it is not yet clear how prosodic prominence interacts with other cues, such as clefting, available in the utterance, especially how L2 learners integrate multiple cues in processing information structure. This paper investigates the relative roles of prosodic and clefting cues in the interpretation of focus position in English utterances by moderate or high proficiency Mandarin listeners of English. It was found that both cues played an important role, with clefting weighting slightly higher. This study contributes significantly to our limited knowledge of how information structure is processed in L2 and has implications for speech perception, language learning and prosodic typology.