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DO L1-L2 DIFFERENCES IN DISCOURSE PROCESSING REFLECT PROCESSING DEMANDS OR DIFFICULTY OF FORM-FUNCTION MAPPING?

EVIDENCE FROM SELF-PACED LISTENING OF CONTRASTIVE PROSODY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 October 2021

Eun-Kyung Lee Open the ORCID record for Eun-Kyung Lee [Opens in a new window]  and
Scott Fraundorf
Eun-Kyung Lee*
Affiliation:
Yonsei University
Scott Fraundorf
Affiliation:
University of Pittsburgh
*
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Eun-Kyung Lee, Department of English Language and Literature, Yonsei University, 50 Yonsei-ro, Seodaemun-gu Seoul 03722, Korea. E-mail: eunkyunglee@yonsei.ac.kr
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Abstract

We examined what causes L1-L2 differences in sensitivity to prominence cues in discourse processing. Participants listened to recorded stories in segment-by-segment fashion at their own pace. Each story established a pair of contrasting items, and one item from the pair was rementioned and manipulated to carry either a contrastive or presentational pitch accent. By directly comparing the current self-paced listening data to previously obtained experimenter-paced listening data, we tested whether reducing online-processing demands allows L2 learners to show a nativelike behavior, such that contrastive pitch accents facilitate later ruling out the salient alternative. However, reduced time pressure failed to lead even higher proficiency L1-Korean learners of English to reach a nativelike level, suggesting that L2 learners’ nonnativelike processing and representation of the prominence cue in spoken discourse processing can be due to the inherent difficulty of fully learning a complex form-function mapping rather than to online-processing demands.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 44 , Issue 4 , September 2022 , pp. 942 - 966
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© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

This work was supported by the Yonsei University Research Grant of 2020. We thank Chu Jiang, Dongxiao Li, Angela Tanygin, and Suzy Wan for assistance with data collection.

References

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