The Use Of Prosodic Cues In Speech Processing Of Second Language

Since the eighties of last century,with the development of speech system engineering,speech prosody has aroused a lot of concern at home and abroad from various subjects of arts and science,such as acoustics,linguistics,psychology and computer science.More and more experts and scholars are paying attention to the important role that prosody,as an indispensible ingredient in human communication,is playing in speech production and comprehension.Great advancement has been made in relevant researches.However,the problems of speech prosody in second language have not been adequately studied.Prosody processing of second language which is different from that of target language has not been intensively explored.Our studies have found that to examine the prosody processing of second language can not only help us learn the common grounds and differences of speech processing between second language and target language,which may lead to more general understanding of human speech processing,but also explore the theories and methods of spoken language teaching of second language and enable second language learners to improve the naturalness and intelligibility of second spoken language.This study focuses on the use of prosodic cues of advanced English learners with Chinese as their native language.Through three main psycholinguistic experiments related to prosodic disambiguation,the study compares the use of prosodic cues in production,comprehension and perception of English ambiguous sentences between American college students with English as their native language and Chinese college students with Chinese as their native language.The research findings indicate that in our production tasks English learners can not produce context appropriate prosody consistently and reliably;based on the analysis of prosodic cues,we also find that English learners use different prosodic cue changes from native speakers to express different meanings.Prosodic comprehension study indicates that to some extent learners can use prosodic information to disambiguate spoken sentences and we also find that raising leaners' prosodic awareness by giving them relevant guidance can help improve learners' prosodic disambiguation ability.Online Perception study finds that English learners use different prosodic cue types and place different cue weight from native speakers in the perception of the key point of the ambiguity,which also reflects the inadequate transfer of first language prosody and cue-trading relationship.This study reveals that advanced second language learners have something in common with native speakers in prosodic disambiguation,but it also demonstrates that the use of prosodic cues in the developing second language is obviously different from the target languageprobably under the influence of first language transfer and language learning environment.Therefore,we propose that speech prosody should be reinforced in second language intonation teaching and learners' prosodic awareness should be raised.Based on our experiments,we predict that the relationship between prosody and meaning can possibly be established in learners' mind through prosodic disambiguation training.