Nakamura Chie, Arai Manabu, Hirose Yuki, Flynn Suzanne
Global Center for Science and Engineering, Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan.
Department of Linguistics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, United States.
Front Psychol. 2020 Jan 10;10:2835. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02835. eCollection 2019.
It has long been debated whether non-native speakers can process sentences in the same way as native speakers do or they suffer from certain qualitative deficit in their ability of language comprehension. The current study examined the influence of prosodic and visual information in processing sentences with a temporarily ambiguous prepositional phrase ("Put the cake on the plate in the basket") with native English speakers and Japanese learners of English. Specifically, we investigated (1) whether native speakers assign different pragmatic functions to the same prosodic cues used in different contexts and (2) whether L2 learners can reach the correct analysis by integrating prosodic cues with syntax with reference to the visually presented contextual information. The results from native speakers showed that contrastive accents helped to resolve the referential ambiguity when a contrastive pair was present in visual scenes. However, without a contrastive pair in the visual scene, native speakers were slower to reach the correct analysis with the contrastive accent, which supports the view that the pragmatic function of intonation categories are highly context dependent. The results from L2 learners showed that visually presented context alone helped L2 learners to reach the correct analysis. However, L2 learners were unable to assign contrastive meaning to the prosodic cues when there were two potential referents in the visual scene. The results suggest that L2 learners are not capable of integrating multiple sources of information in an interactive manner during real-time language comprehension.
非母语者处理句子的方式是否与母语者相同，或者他们在语言理解能力上是否存在某种质性缺陷，这一问题长期以来一直存在争议。当前的研究考察了韵律信息和视觉信息对以英语为母语者以及日语英语学习者处理带有临时歧义介词短语（“把蛋糕放在篮子里的盘子上”）句子的影响。具体而言，我们调查了：（1）母语者是否会给不同语境中使用的相同韵律线索赋予不同的语用功能；（2）第二语言学习者能否通过将韵律线索与句法相结合，并参考视觉呈现的语境信息来得出正确的分析。以英语为母语者的研究结果表明，当视觉场景中存在对比对时，对比重音有助于解决指称歧义。然而，当视觉场景中不存在对比对时，母语者使用对比重音得出正确分析的速度较慢，这支持了语调类别语用功能高度依赖语境的观点。第二语言学习者的研究结果表明，仅视觉呈现的语境就能帮助第二语言学习者得出正确的分析。然而，当视觉场景中有两个潜在指称对象时，第二语言学习者无法给韵律线索赋予对比意义。结果表明，第二语言学习者在实时语言理解过程中无法以交互方式整合多种信息来源。
