The interaction between prosody and meaning in second language speech production.

Abstract

Research has shown that English and German native speakers use prosodic cues during speech production to convey the intended meaning of an utterance. However, little is known about whether American L2 learners of German also use such cues during L2 production. The present study shows that intermediate-level L2 learners of German (English L1) use prosodic cues to disambiguate syntactically ambiguous German sentences during a contextualized sentence production task. These results highlight the interaction between prosody and meaning in L2 speech, suggesting ways in which prosodic training is important not only for L2 pronunciation, but also L2 listening and reading comprehension.