Do cognitive constraints drive second-language listeners’ attention to prosodic information in speech?

Can Chinese learners of English use prosodic cues, as native listeners do, to resolve syntactic ambiguity in spoken-language comprehension? This question was addressed with two speech perception tasks, one in which listeners were aware of potential ambiguity, and one in which they were unaware of the ambiguity. Accuracy scores showed that learners’ use of prosodic information in disambiguation depended on awareness of ambiguity. Without awareness, the listeners’ preference for one meaning over the other could not be reversed by the presence of prosodic cues; after receiving explicit information that there was ambiguity, however, listeners succeeded in identifying the intended utterance meaning by exploiting the available prosody. This result suggests that L2 learners’ often-reported failure to use prosodic information in listening should not be ascribed to inability to use such information, but may instead result from a deliberate choice to restrict levels of processing, in order to simplify the listening task.