Korean speakers’ use of prosody for the resolution of English PP attachment ambiguity

Abstract

It was previously found that Korean speakers of English as a second language resolved English relative clause attachment ambiguity mainly by means of the relative prominence of words, even though they resolved the same type of ambiguity in Korean by boundary marking (H. Baek 2021). The current study examined Korean speakers’ prosodic resolution of English prepositional phrase attachment ambiguity, which does not have comparable ambiguity structure in Korean. The results indicate that while native English speakers used both prosodic boundary cues (word and pause durations) and prominence cues (pitch and intensity), Korean speakers marked boundaries with a pause as the only cue for disambiguation. These findings suggest that when it comes to the grammar of syntax-prosody interaction, the successful use of a prosodic category for one function does not always generalize to its successful learning or use for other functions.