Prosodic Resolution of Syntactic Ambiguities in Second Language : Evidence from Korean Learners of English

Prosodic information is as important as other linguistic information in language processing. The present study examines whether and how Korean-speaking learners of English process prosodic information during the resolution of syntactic ambiguities in English as an L2. First, to identify and compare the baseline parsing preferences for the ambiguity types of interest, a reading comprehension experiment was given to Korean-speaking learners of English and native speakers of English. The results revealed that the native and non-native English speakers had similar parsing preferences across all the sentence types. A subsequent auditory comprehension experiment showed that Korean-speaking learners of English can use prosodic information as much as native English speakers do as a universal parsing strategy. However, their prosodic parsing was not as efficient as native English speakers when processing the syntactic ambiguities that do not exist in their L1 Korean and whose L1 counterparts have different array of relevant words.