A Study of the Ambiguity Resolution of English Prepositional Phrase Attachment via Prosodic Cues
The prosodic cues in a speaker's verbal output play a vital role in smooth,mutual communication for both parties.Research has shown that native English speakers can use prosodic cues during speech production to convey the intended meaning of an utterance.However,little is known about whether Chinese learners of English as a second language(L2)provide prosodic cues to achieve syntactic disambiguation when producing sentences in their L2.The present study aims to determine the precise prosodic cues that the Chinese learners of L2 English use to disambiguate prepositional phrase attachment(PP-attachment)sentences and whether these cues differ from those used by native English speakers.Under contextualized experimental conditions,Chinese college students who were learning English participated in a constrained task involving the verbal production of ambiguous English sentences with prepositional phrases.The results revealed that the Chinese college students who were learning English could use similar prosodic cues to those used by native English speakers to resolve the ambiguity in PP-attachment sentences.The findings highlight the interaction between prosodic features and implied meaning in English speech production,and suggest ways in which training in English prosody can improve not only Chinese learners'pronunciation ability,but also their listening and reading proficiency.
NETL
NSTL
万方数据
