Mapping prosody to reference in L2

Without intonation, this causal relation might be interpreted in multiple ways. The speaker might reason,“There would be no parking either on one of those sides”. This conclusion is then based on the argument,“It's street sweeping day, or something”. This causal relation is interpreted as such by the speaker herself. We can describe such a causal relation as relatively subjective (cf. eg Pander Maat & Sanders 2001, Pander Maat & Degand 2001a, Pit 2003, Verhagen 2005a).

Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 2016

Discourse-level factors, such as event structure and the form of referential expressions, play an important role in native speakers’ referential processing. This paper presents an experiment with Japanese- and Korean-speaking learners of English, investigating the extent to which discourse-level biases that have gradient effects in L1 speakers are also implicated in L2 speakers’ coreference choices. Results from a story continuation task indicate that biases involving referential form were remarkably similar for L1 and L2 speakers. In contrast, event structure, indicated by perfective versus imperfective aspect, had a more limited effect on L2 speakers’ referential choices. The L2 results are discussed in light of existing accounts of L1 reference processing, which assume that referential choices are shaped by speakers’ continually updated expectations about what is likely to be mentioned next, and argued to reflect L2 speakers’ reduced reliance on expectations.

csjarchive.cogsci.rpi.edu

Lingua, 2016

2017

2011

In this report we summarize the approach of examining structural relations between prosody and discourse semantics by means of experimental phonetics. 1 We sketch the computational basis of the project, its method- ological setting, and we present the results of three exper- iments on: • the role of local prominence in disambiguation of focal adverbs • the role of relative prominence in anaphora resolution • the role of global prominence (register features) in discourse structure. 1. METHODS

Discourse Processes, 1997