Notes from class meeting on Tuesday, August 1.

Jeonghwa is interested in seeing how L1 prosody 
affects processing of L2 prosody, with the second 
year paper being a perception study -- to see how 
Korean L1 speakers of English L2 perceive and 
use the prosodic structures that L1 speakers of 
English use to cue syntactic structures -- and 
the 3rd year paper being a follow-up production 
study -- to see whether patterns of (mis)parsing 
of English cues are related to patterns of 
(mis)production of English prosody.

Goal 1 --
Learn how to analyze the prosodic patterns in 
L1 speakers of English, L1 speakers of Korean, 
and Korean L1 speakers of L2 English.  (It would 
be interesting to analyze English L1 speakers of 
L2 Korean, but we don't have access to enough of 
these, so that could be distant future study.)  


One question is what exactly we want to analyze 
in terms of our predictions of possible types of 
influence from L1 to L2.  It seems like there 
are (at least) two different ways in which 
differences could affect processing:

1) At the phonological level, L1 speakers of 
Korean might assimilate English patterns to 
their own patterns in ways that lead to a 
phonological misparse -- like the misparsing 
of Japanese akusento in terms of English 
accent by English L1 learners of Japanese.

2) At the level of syntax-to-phonology 
mapping, if there there are differnces in 
alignment of comparable prosodic structures, 
then there might be misparsings of the 
intended syntactic structure even if the 
phonological structure is correctly 
interpreted.  

Can we think of pairs of sentences that would 
let us distinguish between these two types of 
misparsing?


We have some very good prior work, by Jongmi
Kim and Mira Oh, and also by Julie McGory, on
how Korean L1 prosodic patterns influence the 
production of stress/accent patterns in English.

We know that Bumyoung Choi has worked on 
English L1 speakers' misproductions of Korean 
grouping patterns.  

Question: Has anyone before worked on Korean
L1 speakers' misproductions (or misperceptions)
of English grouping patterns? 
We need to see if there is any compareable

Actually ....  There is a third way that we 
might expect differences to affect processing.

3) If there are differences in availability 
of ambiguity, the use of prosody may be quite 
different, because listeners might have 
difficulty paying attention to the prosody 
if there is no potential for disambiguation.

This is what Jeonghwa is interested in, so she 
will look for constructions that are relevant. 
For example, ...

1. The dean liked the secretary of the professor 
who was reading a letter.

2. The dean liked the professor with the secretary 
who was reading a letter.

These are from:

Claudia Felser, Leah Roberts, Theodore Marinis,
and Rebecca Gross (2003).  The processing of 
ambiguous sentences by first and second language 
learners of English.  Applied Psycholinguistics 24,
453-489.

(Laurie Maynell has worked on using prosody to 
switch bias toward N2 reading for English listeners.) 

But these are not ambiguous in Korean.  The same 
is true of:

3. The lawyer examined the map with the magnifying
glass. 

This would be biased toward the VP-modifying 
adverbial reading for Korean L1 listeners because 
neither reading corresponds to a PP structure in 
Korean, and the verb phrase that translates the 
V-attached reading can be postposed after the main
verb (which is normally sentence-final), but the 
relative clause that translates the N-attached 
reading cannot be moved out of the NP to be 
postposed after the main verb.