I will be available on Thursday (March 19) 12PM - 2PM EDT. If you have questions or comments, please contact me via OSF comments or email at hyunah.baek@stonybrook.edu. Looking forward to seeing your comments!
Abstract: Differences in the perception of segmental contrasts by native and non-native listeners have been formalized as the results of language-specific weightings of acoustic cues in their perception grammar (e.g., Escudero & Boersma 2004). However, less attention has been paid to the weighting of prosodic cues. This study investigated the relative importance of four prosodic cues – duration, pause, pitch, and intensity – in the resolution of English syntactic ambiguity by English native speakers and Korean native speakers. The results suggest that similarly to segmental cues, prosodic cues are also weighted in a language-specific way, which leads to different ambiguity resolution by native and non-native speakers.