Prosodic Cues in Relative Clause Attachment Ambiguity Resolution: An Experimental Comparison of English Native Speakers and Chinese EFL Learners

This study investigates the relative prosodic cue weighting (intensity, pitch, pause, lengthening) in resolving English relative clause (RC) attachment ambiguity by English native speakers and Chinese EFL learners. A two-alternative forced-choice experiment, combined with a d' analysis to ensure a bias-free measure of perceptual sensitivity, revealed qualitatively different cue-weighting strategies. English native speakers demonstrated a flexible, hierarchical strategy, prioritizing pitch as the most decisive cue. In contrast, Chinese EFL learners exhibited a rigid reliance on pause cues; their accuracy was highest in the pause-only condition, while other prosodic cues acted as interference. The groups also showed opposing default parsing biases (native: low attachment; learners: high attachment). These findings provide strong evidence for maladaptive L1 prosodic transfer, where learners inappropriately map Mandarin prosody's functional roles onto English. The study underscores the critical need for L2 pedagogy to incorporate explicit instruction on the syntactic functions of sentential prosody.