Discrepancy in prosodic disambiguation strategies between Chinese EFL learners and native English speakers

Abstract

Abstract 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.