Effect of explicit instruction on Mandarin EFL learners’ prosodic resolution of English syntactic ambiguity

This study used a longitudinal quasi-experimental design to investigate the impact of explicit instruction on Mandarin EFL learners’ ability to disambiguate English syntactic ambiguities. Two classes that showed no significant differences in either accuracy or prosodic parameters for resolving English relative clause attachment ambiguity at pretest were randomly designated to an experimental group ( n = 34) or a control group ( n = 32). The experimental group received an explicit phonetic instruction over six months, whereas the control group received an implicit instruction. Follow-up assessments were conducted at six months to evaluate participants’ disambiguation accuracy and prosodic performance when reading English relative clauses. The data indicated that the experimental group, which employed distinct prosodic strategies, achieved a statistically significant (though modestly) higher accuracy than the control group in disambiguating English relative clauses. Furthermore, these group differences were maintained over the six-month period. The findings indicate that explicit prosodic instruction serves as a moderately effective pedagogical intervention for improving Mandarin EFL learners’ ability to disambiguate English relative clauses, consistent with the revised Speech Learning Model.