Strategic Use of Intonational Cues by Learners of Japanese

Application for Teaching Japanese as a Foreign Language

Abstract

Prosodic features of spoken language play important roles in oral communication. Careful examination of how learners of Japanese perceive and process the semantic implications of prosodic variations in Japanese will, therefore, help improve the quality of instruction in teaching Japanese as a foreign language. This paper focuses on the syntactic function of prosody in Japanese and examines how prosodic cues are used to disambiguate potentially ambiguous sentences by three subject groups: native speakers of Japanese, learners of Japanese at advanced level, and learners of Japanese at intermediate level. The data that were obtained from the empirical examination showed that learners who were at both advanced and intermediate levels were sensitive to the prosodic cues to a greater degree than our original prediction, and that they were using the prosodic cues systematically to arrive at the interpretation of utterances that were consistent with their prosodic structure. This paper further discuses application of the findings to classroom instruction. Specifically, we suggest that Japanese teachers should provide explicit explanation of the syntactic function of prosody along with corresponding structural patterns to encourage learners to use prosody as a tool for better comprehension of spoken Japanese.