The Interaction of Focus Prosody and Lexical Stress on Lexical Processing During Online Sentence Comprehension by Native and Nonnative English Listeners

Abstract

This study investigated how English contrastive focus prosody interacts with lexical stress during online sentence processing among native English speakers and Korean speakers learning English as a second language (L2). In an eye-tracking study, participants heard instructions containing focused trisyllabic nouns with stress on the initial, medial, or final syllable (e.g., cúcumber, banána, chimpanzée). Both groups showed earlier target fixations when focus prosody was contextually felicitous, but only for words with initial or medial stress. The effect was more evident and emerged earlier for the English speakers than for the Korean speakers, suggesting greater difficulty in integrating prosodic cues in L2, as proposed by the Interface Hypothesis (Sorace, 2011). The Korean speakers were more sensitive to prosody on medial-stressed words, possibly reflecting an influence of L1 prosody. These findings suggest that L2 learners use prosody during online sentence comprehension, though their processing is relatively slower and modulated by L1 effects.