Prosodic phrasing in sentence comprehension: Evidence from native English speakers and native Korean-speaking second language learners of English

This work investigates the perception and use of prosodic phrasing in the processing of spoken English sentences by English native speakers (L1ers) and Korean second language learners of English (L2ers). The prosodic structures of English and Korean differ in that English intermediate phrases (ips) have more variable tonal patterns and stronger durational cues than Korean accentual phrases, the Korean counterpart. However, the two languages show similar phonetic and phonological properties for intonation phrases (IPhs).; Three on- and off-line sentence comprehension experiments test sentences containing a verb in an initial subordinate clause that could be intransitive or transitive, resulting in a temporary syntactic ambiguity between Early and Late Closure of the clause. The results provide new evidence for significant effects of both absolute and relative sizes of prosodic boundaries in establishing phrase structure, showing that both language groups make fine-grained prosodic distinctions during parsing. They support previous claims that parsing decisions are influenced by the overall prosodic representation and that there are separable effects of the two phonologically distinctive levels of prosodic phrasing. Despite a generally consistent role of prosodic structure in sentence processing, there are significant differences in the effects of ips between the two language groups. Intermediate prosodic boundaries provide markedly weaker evidence for syntactic boundaries for Korean L2ers than for English L1ers, but the L2ers performed similarly to the L1ers with IPh boundaries. A following discrimination experiment demonstrates that the differential effects of ips are not due to perceptual differences between L1ers and L2ers.; I argue from these results that there exist universal underlying processing principles that govern the role of prosodic phrasing. The different prosodic effects seem likely to stem from categorizing a phonetic pattern as an ip or forming prosody-syntax mappings, which sheds light on the Korean L2ers' developmental stage in perceiving and processing English prosody. Taken together, this dissertation contributes to the L2 literature, in which little is known with respect to the acquisition of prosody and the role of prosody in processing. It also provides further insights for L1 processing by discriminating among hypotheses for the use of prosody in sentence comprehension.