2013 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

Prosodic pattern recognition of high-frequency POS-grams and Phrase-frames

Research Project

Project/Area Number	23720282
Research Category	Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists (B)
Allocation Type	Multi-year Fund
Research Field	Foreign language education
Research Institution	Nagoya University
Principal Investigator	MURAO Remi 名古屋大学, 国際言語文化研究科, 准教授 (80454122)
Project Period (FY)	2011 – 2012
Keywords	英語教育 / 第二言語習得 / 音声言語認識 / プロソディ / コーパス
Research Abstract	This study examined whether Japanese learners of English could recognize the prosodic pattern of a string of part-of-speech (POS-gram) which constitute a phrasal category. The results of prosodic pattern-matching task showed that there was no difference in the performance between advanced and lower level learners in recognizing the prosodic pattern of high and low frequency POS-grams. Native speakers of English (NS) outperformed English learners (NNS) especially on the phrasal categories which appeared frequently in the NS corpus but not in the NNS corpus. Interestingly, non-phrasal categories were recognized at the same level between NS and NNS. The results suggest that although NS and NNS differ in their performance of recognizing prosodic pattern of a phrasal category, it is not a crucial factor that affects listening and reading comprehension skills which divides advanced level learners from lower level learners by their TOIEC scores.