Prosody and Comprehension in Oral Reading by L2 Japanese Learners

Abstract

The absence of a natural “rhythm” when reading aloud is frequently observed in foreign language learners (L2 learners). These rhythmic or prosodic errors in oral reading may be due to a lack of comprehension of certain syntactic structures. As little research on prosody in L2 oral reading exists, the current study attempted to describe the relationship between prosody and sentence comprehension in L2 Japanese through the use of an oral reading task. This study specifically examined the relationship between prosodic production of branching modifiers and comprehension in American JFL learners. Two proficiency groups of JFL learners were presented with a series of sentences containing both syntactically ambiguous and unambiguous sentences, each followed by a comprehension question. A control group of native speakers of Japanese was also included in the analysis in order to compare reading prosody. Experimental results suggest that the learners were often incapable of producing the correct prosody, despite their generally high comprehension ability. It was concluded that prosody is disassociated from comprehension by JFL learners in the sentence types examined.