The Prosody-semantic Interface in the Resolution of L2 Syntactic Ambiguity

The present study examines the interface between semantic and prosodic boundary information in the resolution of L2 syntactic ambiguity. In a cross-modal auditory comprehension experiment, 5 native English speakers as a control group and 20 Korean learners of English listened to syntactically ambiguous English sentences with or without semantically and prosodically-biased information. The results showed that both native English speakers and L2 learners utilized semantic and prosodic information to resolve the syntactic ambiguities. Different types of semantic information yielded different effects on the use of prosodic boundary cues in both groups. The native and non-native groups, however, were different in their preferences for the use of semantic and prosodic cues, especially when the two cues were in conflict. Native English listeners relied more on semantic cues than on prosodic cues to resolve the syntactic ambiguity when the two cues were conflicting, and they utilized prosodic information more reliably only when the syntactic ambiguity was not resolved with semantic information. Whereas, L2 learners’ parsing was influenced by the prosodic cues even when the semantic cues clearly directed the meaning of the ambiguous sentence. The results indicate that L2 sentence processing can be accounted for by the universal interactive-constraint model (MacDonald et al. 1994). However, L2 auditory sentence processing is different from L1 in that L2 learners are more susceptible to cognitive interference from conflicting cues than native speakers (Cunnings 2016).