Clause type anticipation based on prosody in Mandarin
Yang Yang | Center for Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies | Leiden University Centre for Linguistics
Stella Gryllia | Leiden University Centre for Linguistics
Leticia Pablos | Leiden University Centre for Linguistics | Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition
Lisa Lai-Shen Cheng | Leiden University Centre for Linguistics | Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition
Mandarin wh-words such as shénme are wh-indeterminates, which
can have interrogative interpretations (‘what’) or non-interrogative interpretations (i.e., ‘something’), depending on the context
and licensors. For example, when diǎnr (‘a little’) appears right in front of a wh-word, the
string can have either a wh-question or a declarative interpretation (henceforth,
wh-declarative). Yang (2018) carried out a production study and the
results showed that wh-questions and wh-declaratives have different prosodic properties. To
investigate whether and when listeners make use of prosody to anticipate the clause type (i.e., question vs. declarative), we
conducted a sentence perception study and an audio-gating experiment. Results of the perception study and the gating experiment
show that (1) Participants can make use of prosody to differentiate the two clause types; (2) Starting from the onset of the first
word of the target sentence (wh-question/wh-declarative), participants already demonstrate a
preference for the clause type that was intended by the speaker. The current study also sheds light on the clausal typing
mechanism in Mandarin (e.g., how to mark a clause as a wh-question) by providing evidence of the role of prosody
in marking clause types in Mandarin.
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