Effects of Prosodic Cues and Semantic Plausibility on Japanese Learners of English’s Processing of Structurally Ambiguous Utterances

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2023-08

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Ohio State University. Libraries

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Abstract

This study examined whether prosody cues and semantic plausibility can facilitate L2 ambiguous English sentence processing. Several studies have shown that prosody disambiguates syntactic structure and facilitates sentence processing in L1 (Snedeker and Trueswell 2003, Snedeker and Casserly 2010), but not in L2. This experiment was conducted to investigate the effect of prosody and semantic plausibility using spoken utterances with pause condition control. The results suggest that both verb bias and semantic plausibility factors are relevant to the processing of ambiguous utterances. In addition, the difference in reaction time was possibly caused by the strength of Garden pass effects depending on the change in thematic domain. Overall, this paper advocates for the necessity of including prosody and semantic effects on L2 structural ambiguity sentences.

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prosody, semantic plausibility, structural ambiguity, spoken utterances

Citation

Mogushi, Reina. "Effects of Prosodic Cues and Semantic Plausibility on Japanese Learners of English’s Processing of Structurally Ambiguous Utterances." Buckeye East Asian Linguistics, vol. 7 (August 2023), p. 105-112.