Perception of Prosodic Cues in the Resolution of Ambiguous Sentences in English

Abstract

The paper investigated whether Korean middle school students were able to resolve ambiguous sentences in spoken English by relying on prosodic cues. Fifty eight junior high school students in Seoul and 6 peer native English listeners (Korean-Americans) in the US participated in a comprehension test, which consisted of 20 questions of main-subordinate and parenthetical syntactic structures. The results indicated that, unlike the native English listeners, a vast majority of the Korean students had much difficulty resolving ambiguous sentences although the sentences were disambiguated by prosodic cues such as phrase final lengthening, phrasing, and pauses. The Korean students' listening comprehension was not correlated with their general English ability. However, an analysis of major textbooks being used in middle schools in Korea suggests that the Korean students' poor performance in the comprehension test may be ascribable partly to their lack of exposure to the relationship between syntactic structure and prosodic structure. Based on the findings of the study, implications for the teaching of intonational cues for the resolution of ambiguous sentences in English were drawn.