Prosodic processing in sentences with ‘only’ in L1 and L2 English

Rachida Ganga; Haoyan Ge; Marijn E. Struiksma; Virginia Yip; Aoju Chen

doi:10.1017/S0272263124000019

Prosodic processing in sentences with ‘only’ in L1 and L2 English

Rachida Ganga, Haoyan Ge, Marijn E. Struiksma, Virginia Yip, Aoju Chen^*

^*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › Academic › peer-review

Abstract

It has been proposed that second language (L2) learners differ from native speakers in processing due to either influence from their native language or an inability to integrate information from multiple linguistic domains in a second language. To shed new light on the underlying mechanism of L2 processing, we used an event-related potentials (ERP) paradigm to examine the processing of sentences with only in English by native speakers of English and advanced Dutch learners of English. Successful processing of sentences with only requires rapid integration of prosodic information with semantic and syntactic information. We found that L2 listeners showed native-like processing of the acoustics of contrastive pitch accents when adjacent to only. However, they needed more cues than L1 listeners to perform native-like in forming expectations for focus placement. Our results thus provide first ERP-based evidence for difficulty in the integration of information for focus expectation in difficult L2 constructs.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	478-503
Number of pages	26
Journal	Studies in Second Language Acquisition
Volume	46
Issue number	2
Early online date	14 Feb 2024
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1017/S0272263124000019
Publication status	Published - May 2024

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press.

Funding

We thank all the participants for their participation, and Zenghui Liu, Aelish Hart, and Nelleke Jansen for their help with testing the participants. We also thank Piet van Tuijl for his input on the statistical analyses and Chris van Run and his colleagues at the Institute for Language Sciences Labs (previously UiL-OTS Linguistics Labs) for their technical support. We also thank Karsten Steinhauer for his feedback on the data preprocessing and the anonymous reviewers for their useful comments. This research was funded by a Westerdijk Talent grant awarded to Aoju Chen by the Dutch Research Council. Portions of the (preliminary) results were reported at the International Workshop on the L1 and L2 acquisition of Information Structure (2019), the Ninth Annual Society for the Neurobiology of Language Meeting (2017), the Second Hanyang International Symposium on Phonetics and Cognitive Sciences of Language (2019), the Third Phonetics and Phonology in Europe Conference (2019), and the 35 Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing (2021). th

Funders	Funder number
Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek

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prosodic-processing-in-sentences-with-only-in-l1-and-l2-englishFinal published version, 1.38 MBLicence: CC BY-NC-ND

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abstract = "It has been proposed that second language (L2) learners differ from native speakers in processing due to either influence from their native language or an inability to integrate information from multiple linguistic domains in a second language. To shed new light on the underlying mechanism of L2 processing, we used an event-related potentials (ERP) paradigm to examine the processing of sentences with only in English by native speakers of English and advanced Dutch learners of English. Successful processing of sentences with only requires rapid integration of prosodic information with semantic and syntactic information. We found that L2 listeners showed native-like processing of the acoustics of contrastive pitch accents when adjacent to only. However, they needed more cues than L1 listeners to perform native-like in forming expectations for focus placement. Our results thus provide first ERP-based evidence for difficulty in the integration of information for focus expectation in difficult L2 constructs.",

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AU - Chen, Aoju

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Prosodic processing in sentences with ‘only’ in L1 and L2 English

Abstract

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