Professor Mineharu Nakayama
Ph.D, University of Connecticut
Associate Professor of East Asian Languages
The Ohio State University, U.S.A.

Abstract

Foreign language learners (L2 learners) have often been observed to lack a natural "rhythm" when reading aloud. This rhythm of speech, referred to as prosody, has been shown to reflect syntax in certain grammatical structures. Learner's prosodic errors in oral reading may be due to a lack of comprehension of these syntactic structures. As little research on prosody in L2 oral reading exists, the current study attempted to describe the relationship between prosody and sentence comprehension in L2 Japanese. Our experiment contained sentences with both unambiguous and ambiguous branching modifiers, and the locations of prosodic breaks in oral reading were the prosodic feature under analysis. Twenty-six American JFL learners and four native speakers of Japanese participated in this study. Overall, both groups performed well on the sentence comprehension questions, indicating little difficulty in understanding the branching modifiers contained in the test sentences. However, we found that the match between prosody in oral reading and the answers to the comprehension questions were rather low, in particular, by the JFL learners. It appears that their ability to produce the correct prosody has not fully developed though they were able to understand the target syntactic structures. This further suggests the separation of the development of prosodic production and that of the comprehension of the syntactic structures in the test sentence types used.

(This work is with Seth Goss of Ohio State.) .