Results, cont.

1
Phrasal Prominence in the English of Native
Spanish Speakers Emily Nava, Maria Luisa
Zubizarreta, and Gregory Madan (University of
Southern California) LSA Summer Meeting 2008
Results, cont. A window closed
ENC L2 Table 5. L2 Speaker
Proficiency Levels (CLOZE test ) Con
clusions 1. Prosodic transfer exists L2ers use
General NSR to compute NS 2. Learners acquire
A-Deacc before NS 3. L2ers who have acquired
Specific NSR have also acquired A-Deacc 4. More
production of Deacc pronouns than Deacc NPs
(Reason Deacc of latter is discourse
dependent) 5. Some (but not all) high proficiency
learners manage to acquire the L2 phrasal
prosodic pattern

• Research questions
• How is prosody at the phrasal level different in
  English and Spanish?
• Do L2 learners of English transfer prosodic
  prominence patterns from their L1?
• If so, can L2 learners overcome transfer?
• Background
• Nuclear Stress Rule (NSR) placement of main
  phrasal prominence or nuclear stress (NS), which
  is intimately linked to the focus structure of an
  utterance (2, 3, 5, 7)
• In wide focus contexts, English (and other
  Germanic languages) has two types of NSR which
  assign prosodic prominence based on the syntactic
  structure of the sentence
• 1. Specific NSR Given two metrical sister
  nodes A and B, if B is an argument of verb A,
  then B is prosodically strong. (NS is phrase
  internal underline location of NS)

• Rationale Acquiring Specific NSR requires that
  the learner restructure his native NSR algorithm,
  but acquiring Anaphoric Deaccenting does not.
• Predictions
• Less proficient learners who have not acquired
  the Germanic Specific NSR may or may not have
  Anaphoric Deccenting in their speech
• More proficient learners who have acquired the
  Germanic Specific NSR will have Anaphoric
  Deaccenting in their speech
• Experimental Design
• Subjects
• 30 English Native Controls (ENC)
• 24 L1 Spanish/L2 English (L2ers)
• 12 High proficiency, 12 Intermediate proficiency
  (Cloze Test measure of proficiency)
• Method
• Scripted QA dialogue

What happened? What does Paul do for a
living? N V N
N V A window closed. Hes a
lion hunt-er
High proficiency ( NS, A-Deacc) a. Fun. The
band came. b. No, he doesnt read books.
High proficiency (- NS, A-Deacc) a. Not good.
The police came. b. Because I collect stamps.
N ADV V N V
ADV A window suddenly closed.
A window closed suddenly.
Intermediate proficiency (- NS, - A-Deacc) a.
Fun. The band came. b. No, he doesnt read books.
Se cerró una ventana. Una
ventana se cerró. closed a window
(VS) a window closed (SV)
Why did you buy that old stamp? Why is
John unhappy? Because I collect stamps.
Because Maria talked about him.

• Acknowledgements This research was supported by
  NSF grant BCS-0444088 and by an Undergraduate
  Research Program Grant.
• References
• 1 Gussenhoven, C. 2004. The phonology of tone
  and intonation. Cambridge, UK
• New York Cambridge University Press.
• 2 Halle, M. JR Vergnaud. 1987. An Essay on
  Stress. MIT Press.
• 3Jackendoff, R. 1974. Semantic Interpretation
  in Generative Grammar. MIT Press.
• 4 Ladd, D. R. 1996. Intonational Phonology.
  University Press.
• 5 Reinhart, T. 2006. Interface strategies
  optimal and costly computation.
• Cambridge, Mass. MIT Press.
• 6 Sosa, J. M. 1999. La entonación del español.
  Madrid Ediciones Cátedra.
• 7 Zubizarreta, M. L. 1998. Prosody, focus, and
  word order. Cambridge, Mass.
• MIT Press.
• Contact Information gmadan_at_usc.edu
  www-rcf.usc.edu/zubizarr/SLAGroup.htm

Porque yo colecciono estampillas. Porque
María habló de él. Because I collect stamps.
Because Maria talked about him.