Discrepancy in prosodic disambiguation strategies between Chinese EFL learners and native English speakers
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21333006 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Liya Xue (0000-0001-5751-2099, Zhejiang University, corresponding author), Ming Yue (0000-0001-6872-3991, Zhejiang University) |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 62 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 1065-1092 |
| Publication date | 2024-06-25 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | IRAL - International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0019-042X • E-ISSN: 1613-4141 |
| Publisher | Walter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE) |
| DOI | 10.1515/iral-2022-0004 |
| OpenAlex | W4318700691 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 39 |
Previous studies on prosodic disambiguation have found Chinese EFL learners capable of using prosodic cues for both boundary marking and focus encoding in English, but somewhat differently from native English speakers. No clear understanding has yet been obtained about their overall use of prosodic strategies in speech production for disambiguation. In this study, we conducted a contextualized production task followed by perception judgments and acoustic analyses to investigate their prosodic disambiguation, with native English speakers as the contrast group. We considered three types of prosodic cues (duration, pitch, and intensity), and examined ambiguities in both syntactic structure and information structure. We found that Chinese EFL learners did alter their prosodic cues to disambiguate two readings, but differently from native English speakers in both cue number and cue combination. Specifically, they used a narrower range of cues and provided insufficient prosodic information, consequently leading to poor perception by native listeners. Our findings argue for prosodic disambiguation training in foreign language teaching
Contrast (vision) · Duration (music) · English as a foreign language · Linguistics · Perception · Task (project management) · Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Phonetics and Phonology Research · Psychology · Speech and dialogue systems
Articulatory Measures of Prosody
Native Listening
Language Transfer
Intonation
Syntax and Speech
Using prosody to avoid ambiguity
Experimental and theoretical advances in prosody
The use of prosody in syntactic disambiguation
Universals of listening
Ambiguity resolution and information structure
On the Role of Sentence Stress in Sentence Processing
A prosody tutorial for investigators of auditory sentence processing
Focus, Accent, and Argument Structure
How Prosody Influences Sentence Comprehension
Multiple Constraints on Processing Ambiguous Sentences
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 3 |
| Citation span | 2025 - 2026 (2) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 3 |