The present study is an initial attempt to explore production of L2 prosodic disambiguation; nevertheless, it has several limitations.
For instance, to avoid overloading the cognitive resources of limited English learners, the syntactically ambiguous utterances tested here are less complicated and difficult，的 comparedto other types such as
“The shooting of the hunters was terrible," which involved genitive ambiguity (Katz & Fodor, 1964,used in Lehiste, 1973). One possible semantic interpretation of the genitive ambiguous utterance is that the hunters were terribly shot; the other is that the hunters made terrible shooting. Next, since it is more uncertain to elicit the data needed from spontaneous speech, reading aloud is the last resort to investigating L2 learners' production of prosodic disambiguation.
Thirdly, owing to lack of English learners at elementary and intermediate level,the findings obtained here cannot provide a more comprehensive evidence for a developmental stage of prosodic disambiguation in L2 production. Finally,the results from this small sample size could only provide a tentative conclusion. Further research on production of L2 prosodic disambiguation is clearly needed.
In conclusion, our results showed that when informed of the ambiguities in advance, native speakers could produce prosodic boundaries to categorize the syntactic structure of an ambiguous utterance in the reading aloud task at sentence level.The finding gives credence to the argument that informative prosodic boundaries rely on conditions where speakers think the informative prosodic boundaries are needed. Advanced learners were able to adjust the pauses of
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critical boundaries to produce a nativelike prosodic disambiguation norm, whereas limited learners were not able to. This supports a developmental stage of L2 English prosody.
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ABOUTTHEAUTHOR
Pi-Lan Yang is an associate professor of the Foreign Languages Education Center at National Kaohsiung Marine University. Her research interests are second language acquisition, syntax, and psycholinguistics.
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初探臺灣英語學習者使用韻律 傳達歧異語句的適當意義
摘要
針對外語人士使用韻律澄清法來傳達歧異語句的適當意 義的研究，能夠協助揭示他們外語音韻能力的發展情 形。利用朗誦閱讀的工其，本研究試圖初步探討，當臺 灣英語學習者唸出歧異語句時，是否能像英語人士一 樣，確實地使用韻律邊界的策略，以表達出正確的意義。
並就英語學習者的英語程度和這種策略使用的關餘，做 進一步的討論。實驗結果顯示，在朗誦閱讀之前，就被 告知歧異語句的適當意義的進階英語學習者，能像英語 人士一樣，特意地拉長關鍵的片語結構邊界，即韻律澄 清法，以便傳遞歧異語句的過切意義，但低程度英語學 習者則沒有使用這種策略。這些發現支持英語學習者的 英語音韻能力，有其發展的不同階段。除此，本研究建 議臺灣英語教師明確地教導學生句法、音韻，和它們之
間的關餘，期待成功地玲養出他們的英語音韻能力。
關鍵詞:韻律澄清法 朗誦閱讀 韻律邊界歧異語句