Discrepant Prosodic Effects on PP-Attachment Ambiguity Processing by L1 and L2 Listeners.

Abstract

While the impact of prosody on sentence processing in a first language (L1) has been widely studied and is well-documented, the extent to which second language (L2) learners utilize prosodic cues remains less clear. This study investigated how prosody affects the resolution of prepositional phrase (PP) attachment ambiguity, particularly when combined with visual contextual cues, and compared the performance by native English speakers and Chinese learners of English. Participants' attachment preferences alongside their reaction time from both correct and incorrect responses were analyzed to assess differences in L1 and L2 sentence processing. The results reveal that native participants were able to make effective use of prosodic information to resolve PP-attachment ambiguity, even when the accompanying visual context biased a noun phrase attachment. In contrast, the Chinese L2 learners showed a strong and consistent preference for the verb phrase attachment. This suggests that their sentence processing relied more heavily on the structure-based parsing strategies. These contrasting patterns between L1 and L2 speakers highlight the challenges L2 learners have in coordinating multiple information sources, such as prosody and visual context, during language comprehension.