汉语作为第二语言的韵律组块认知加工研究

The prosodic phrasing impacted by chunking in Chinese as a second language

为探讨汉语作为第二语言的韵律组块,研究以英语为母语的低水平学习者、高水平学习者和汉语母语者共45人为对象,考查三者在复述含有不同性质和修饰语长度的句法成分的句子时停顿率和语流长度的变化。结果发现:(1)句法成分的性质与句法结构的关系更密切,进而作用于句子层面的句法计算,对韵律组块的影响较大,而长度多被用于词汇和语义通达基础之上的单位边界距离的调节,与句法计算没有直接关系,因此对韵律组块的影响相对较小;(2)学习者和母语者的区别,在于句子层面的句法加工方式不同。学习者的韵律组块,依赖控制性加工的句法计算,句法成分的组合过程尚未程序自动化,需消耗注意力资源,所以会受句法结构复杂度的影响,附属句法成分越多,修饰语越长,停顿率就越高,语流长度也越短;(3)句法成分的性质和长度对韵律组块的影响,反映了句子层面的句法加工在认知资源分配上的问题。为提高学习者的汉语口语韵律组块能力,教师应在课堂上增加基于口语表达结构的韵律组块输入与练习,帮助学习者将句子层面的句法计算程序化。学习者也需习得母语者的“压缩组合”策略,依靠语义联想和长度来调整组块的大小,而不是用固定长度的组块产出所有句子。

To investigate the impacts of syntactic constituency and length on the prosodic chunking of spoken Chinese,this study recruited in a sentence recall experiment fifteen English-speaking adult learners of lower-level and higher-level Chinese respectively,and fifteen native speakers of Chinese as the baseline group for comparison. The type of syntactic constituents and the length of noun modifiers were varied so as to examine the changes of pause rate and chunk size caused by alternation of syntactic constituency and length in sentence recall. Results showed that(1)constituent attributes had more direct impacts on prosodic chunking because of their close relationship with syntactic structures which had effects on the syntactic computation,whereas the constituent length had a secondary role of modulating the distance between chunks based on lexical and semantic access in sentence production;(2)the major difference of prosodic chunking between learners and native speakers was their Chinese syntactic computation. Unlike native speakers’ automatic processing of prosodic chunks,learners relied more on the controlled processing of syntactic structures in speaking,which needed attentional control to combine syntactic constituents into prosodic chunks. The more peripheral constituents and modifiers there were,the more difficult the sentence construction would be,resulting in higher pause rate and shorter chunk size in sentence recall;(3)the impacts of syntactic constituency and length on prosodic chunking reflect the operational efficiency of cognitive resources in sentence production. To improve learners’ Chinese prosodic chunking,teachers should incorporate more input and exercises of prosodic chunks derived from oral performance structures in class to facilitate the automatization of learners’ Chinese syntactic computation. Learners should also acquire the“compressed chunking”strategy as native Chinese speakers do,by which native speakers utilize semantic associations between syntactic constituents to adjust chunk sizes rather than stick to a fixed size of chunks in Chinese sentence production.