Perception of Intonation in Native and Non-Native Speakers of English

Sensitivity to intonational cues in non-native speakers of a language was investigated. Groups of native and non-native speakers of English listened to recordings of constituent structure ambiguities read with intonation patterns appropriate to either the more probable or less probable interpretation. Experiment I employed a paraphrase/translation task in which attention was called neither to the ambiguity nor to the intonation. In Experiment II, subjects were alerted to both these variables and were asked to identify which of the two readings they had heard. The results indicated that native and non-native speakers alike can make use of intonation if they explicitly listen for it, though prosodic features are generally ignored when other cues (e.g., semantic and pragmatic) are available.