Title: Age-related Variations in E.F.

L Learners'
Attentiveness to Prosodic vs. Syntactic Cues of
Sentence Structure : Volume 8. Issue 2 Article 7

Researchers: Forood Sepassi, Ph.D. and Azad University,

Shiraz

Reference/ Source: http://asian-efl-journal.com/June_06_fs.php

Date of Publication: June 2006

Purpose of the Study:

The study aimed to determine the relationship between the

age of Iranian EFL learners of the 'Iran Language Institutes' lower-
intermediate classes in the Summer of 2005 and the strategy they
seek in their interpretation of sentences.

Theoretical Position:

The study was anchored on the theory of Fernald & Mazzie

(1991) and Read & Schreiber (1982) ,which states the existence of an
age-related processing dimension in L1 acquisition. More
specifically, it was found that younger speakers are more inclined to
attend to prosodic cues of structure, while older speakers relied more
on syntactic cues.

Asher & Garcia (1969) and Selinger, Krashen &

Ladefoged (1975) theory emphasized that younger learners are
more likely to attain near-native L2 proficiency in the more
natural (ESL) situations. Others, such as Ekstrand (1976, 1978), and
Fathman (1975), have claimed that when time is held constant older
learners tend to syntactically outperform the younger ones in both
natural and planned settings.

Method:

Respondents

• 40 Iranian EFL learners of both genders .The sample was then

stratified into the following age groups with 20 participants in
each:

a) twelve and thirteen year olds - to comply with Lenneberg's

 critical age hypothesis which considers this two year span as
the cut off period in the individual's language learning ability;
and,

b) seventeen and over - to account for the gradual loss of control

over the motor skills associated with the adult learner.

Research Conducted

• Lower-intermediate classes in the Summer of 2005

• 'Iran Language Institutes'

Research Instrument

• List of 30 audio- tape recorder/player sentences with prosodic

and syntactic cues

Research Procedure

• The participants were seated individually in front of the tester

across a table with two tape recorder/players - one to play the
pre-recorded sentences and the other to record the participants'
responses. Then, the following instructions were provided to the
participants:
i. The first five sentences were meant to serve as models.
The tester would complete the task by repeating a special
part after each sentence was played. The participant, by
listening to the tester's responses to the first five
sentences, would be expected to determine what part of
the remaining sentences he/she is expected to utter - no
grammatical terms were mentioned;

ii. The participant's responses to the next 10 sentences, 6

to 16, would be corrected, if necessary, in order to direct
his/her attention to the part expected to be uttered; and,

iii. The participant should withhold his/her response until the

completion of the sentence being played.

Results and Discussion

 • The results obtained were categorized into:

i. Performance on unambiguous sentences:

 The unambiguous sentences contained non-conflicting

prosodic and syntactic cues. Hence, the participants'
scores on items of this type is a measure of their success
in correctly identifying the subject noun phrase, or being
attentive to syntax.
 Through a t-test, the older group of participants
scored a significantly higher mean than the younger
one (older learners were successful 11.45 times while the
younger learners mean score stood at 10.35).
 The said results serve to prove that even in the absence of
prosodic stimuli, given the non-conflicting nature of the
cues, the younger participants were less apt to follow a
syntactically motivated strategy in their interpretation of
the unambiguous sentences than the older ones.

ii. Performance on ambiguous sentences.

 Younger learners are more attentive to prosody and older

ones to syntax; it needed to be established that that
participants of the younger group would score higher
means on following syntax than prosody, while participants
of the older group would score higher means on syntax
than prosody.
 A higher score on prosody by the younger group, as
opposed to a higher score on syntax by the older group.

Evaluation

Prosody interacts with, and adds value to, other language

subsystems, such as syntax and semantics, facilitating understanding
and providing scaffolding to children when acquiring language. For
example, prosodic cues help segment the speech stream into phrases,
words and syllables, inform syntactic structure, and emphasize salient
information to facilitate understanding. Language users perceive
speech to be made up of discrete sentences, phrases, words and even
phonemes, although utterances are produced in an almost continuous
speech stream. In English, the prosodic stress pattern of alternating
strong and weak syllables provides a reliable and useful tool to
separate words in speech, because strong syllables generally are
assumed to mark the beginning of lexical words (such as nouns and
verbs).

One aspect of phonology that has recently received more attention

is prosody: the phonological subsystem that encompasses the tempo,
rhythm and stress of language. Wood and Terrell (1998) found that
young poor readers are relatively insensitive to the suprasegmental
(prosodic) cues of rhythm and stress at the phrasal level.

According to Bolinger (1978), the first universal property of prosody

is the interface between prosodic and syntactic breaks. Once the
speech stream has been segmented into words, the listener must
extract the accompanying syntactic structure. Prosodic boundaries
reliably inform parsing decisions, particularly at the phrasal level,
providing reliable cues for ‘chunking’ spoken language into
comprehensible syntactic units such as phrases and sentences
(Cutler, Dahan, & van Donselaar, 1997).

Prosody provides access to different meanings by focusing the

listener’s attention on new or contrastive information and
deaccentuating older or less relevant information (Warren, 1996).
Prosody can also denote whether the same string of words is a
question, a statement, a sarcastic comment or an exclamation (Speer
et al., 1993). The application of a different prosodic structure to a
sentence, such as ‘John was here’, can change its message from a
statement to a question.

Through the descriptive correlational method, a research would be

able to elucidate the contribution of prosodic and syntactic cues to the
age-related variation in sentence interpretation and comprehension.
However, further research is needed to explore the relative importance
of prosodic and syntactic cram in the comprehension of spoken versus
written language, and to determine the extent to which different
aspects of prosodic vs. syntactic skills contribute differentially to
different aspects of reading.