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Speech Act and Prosody Interaction during Listening Comprehension in L2ers: Evidence from an ERP Study
Poster B45 in Poster Session B and Reception, Thursday, October 6, 6:30 - 8:30 pm EDT, Millennium Hall
Myung-Kwan Park1, Wonil Chung1; 1Univ. of Dongguk
During interpersonal communication, listeners must quickly evaluate verbal and vocal cues to elicit an integrated meaning about the utterance and about the speaker, including a representation of the speaker's intent or speech act (SA) (Hellbernd and Sammler, 2016). In this study, we investigated the time-course and neural responses underlying a listener's ability to evaluate SA from combined verbal and vocal cues. We recorded real-time brain responses as listeners heard three different types of SA utterances conveying three kinds of prosodic or intonation patterns, which follow immediately after the preceding relevant discourse contexts; Regel and Gunter, 2017; Steinhauer, 2003). Seventeen Korean learners of English with an advanced level of English proficiency participated in this experiment. The experimental materials for our ERP study consisted of three different types of sentences (declarative (D), question (Q), and reprimanding/complimenting (RC)) with their corresponding prosodic patterns. Type A: The prescription didn't match my name. The doctor who made that mistake is Lavender. Type B: I didn't catch her name. Is her name Lavender? Type C: We cannot accept any mistakes in the process. But you made one, Lavender. The stimuli were presented auditorily. ERPs were measured at the critical elements such as Lavender in each type. In comparison between ‘correctly used’ three SA types, Type B was less negative than Type A and C in the N400 area. In analyses of the three types. there was a significant effect of type at the 150-250 ms interval, due to the difference between Type A and B; a marginal effect of type in the 250-500 ms, due to the difference between Type A and B; and a significant effect of type in the 500-700 ms, due to the difference between Type A and B. The combined results show characteristic prosodic feature configurations for three different SAs that were reliably recognized by L2 listeners. Interestingly, identification of SAs was contingent on their type, and the difficulty in this process varied. Across types, Q-prosody SAs were easier to recognize than D- and RC-prosody ones. Within each type, (i) normal D-prosody SAs were more difficult to comprehend than anomalous Q-prosody ones; (ii) normal Q-prosody SAs were less difficult to process than anomalous D-prosody ones in the earlier interval, but the former registered difficulty in the later interval; (iii) normal RC-prosody SAs were less difficult to detect than the other two types of SAs. Overall, the data demonstrate that speakers’ SAs are represented in the prosodic signal which can, thus, determine the success of interpersonal communication.
Topic Areas: Prosody, Meaning: Lexical Semantics