A Psycholinguistic Investigation On Prosodic Cues To Syntactic Disambiguation In L2 Processing

As the pivotal link of oral sentence comprehension and production,prosody is highly connected with syntax,semantics and pragmatics,and the research of prosody-syntactic interaction has attracted attention of acoustic linguistics and cognitive psychology.However,compared with L1 prosody-syntactic disambiguation research,the study of prosody in L2 syntactic disambiguation and interaction is still less investigated.It is necessary to study the processing mechanism of L2prosody-syntactic disambiguation not only to understand further about the differences between two languages,but also to explore and supplement the teaching theories of L2 prosody usage,improving the fluency and naturalness of L2 learners.Through two psycholinguistic experiments,this research,has explored whether Chinese-English L2 learners can perceive and produce prosodic cues smoothly in oral English sentence comprehension and production.With prepositional attachment(PP-attachment)ambiguous sentences as the materials,the prosodic cues used by the second language learners during syntactic disambiguation were explored,focusing on their preferences in prosody usage and the expression of their psychological mechanism in syntactic parsing.All the participants of Chinese-English L2 learners were recruited into two groups by English proficiency.Through acoustic analyses and combining statistics of comprehension and production experiments,this research includes mainly three findings.Firstly,both of higher-and less-proficient participants can perceive pauses inserted at the boundaries of temporarily ambiguous sentences in the prosody-syntactic comprehension experiment,which indicates that they have capacity to differentiate syntactic structures through certain prosodic cues,and the psychological mechanism of prosody-syntactic interaction obeys the consistency of prosody and syntax.Secondly,in the prosody production experiment,the higher-proficient L2 learners prefer to use pauses rather than use duration or pitch accent to express their meanings in different contexts accurately,and the model of psychological mechanism in syntactic disambiguation through prosody is processed as the sequential model.Thirdly,in the production experiment,the less-proficient L2 learners could not use any prosodic cue in sentence production,which indicates that there is no interaction between prosody and syntax,proving that the prosody-syntactic interaction is influenced by language proficiency.Based on the results of two experiments,the relationship between prosodic cues and syntactic structures has been clarified in this thesis.Through acoustic analyses of the statistics and combining previous experimental results,this study also reveals the general rules of prosody used by Chinese-English L2 learners in their second language disambiguation.In particular,this thesis discusses the psychological processing mechanism of the interaction between prosody and syntax,and elaborates the importance of cultivating learners’ awareness of prosody in oral English teaching,which can help the second language learners to use prosody in obtaining and expressing the important information during their second language acquisition.