Exploring the Contribution(s) of Prosody to Ambiguity Resolution and Reading Comprehension in English as an Additional Language (EAL)

There is ample evidence that prosodic cues in intonational phrase boundaries facilitate the chunking of speech in adults. Additionally, the Implicit Prosody Hypothesis proposes that these prosodic cues influence chunking in silent reading, and punctuation has indeed been shown to induce prosodic breaks that shape parsing decisions. While prosodic sensitivity has also been shown to influence children’s reading abilities, the exact interactions between implicit prosody in reading, speech prosody, and reading comprehension remain unclear, especially among bilingual children. Our aim is to disentangle these aspects of prosody and their contributions to reading outcomes among pupils who speak English as an Additional Language (EAL) in the UK – an under- researched group of bilingual children which has been shown to underperform in reading compared to monolingual peers. In accordance with past research, we are also examining vocabulary and grammar abilities. We will present a reading eye-tracking experiment – comparing EAL pupils (n = 37) to monolingual peers (n = 27) in Year 5 (9-10 years old). The experiment uses a temporary NP-Zero ambiguity, a type of ambiguity which is prosodically disambiguated in listening, and examines the prosodico-syntactic effect of commas. Pupils performed significantly worse when the stimuli were presented without a comma. There were no group effects. A significant interaction was observed between performance in the reading experiment and expressive prosodic tasks. Reading measures showed garden path effects but no significant interaction with prosodic tasks was found.