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Article published In: Korean Linguistics
Vol. 18:1 (2022) ► pp.18–47

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Prosodic disambiguation of questions in Korean

Theory and processing

 | Stony Brook University
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 28 March 2022
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https://doi.org/10.1075/kl.00014.yun
Abstract
This study aims to identify the acoustic and perceptual properties that contribute to identifying the meaning of Korean sentences that are ambiguous between wh-question and yes-no question readings. While in most cases the Accentual Phrase (AP) tonal pattern (Jun, Sun-Ah. 1993. The phonetics and phonology of Korean prosody. PhD Dissertation. University of California, Los Angeles.) differs between the two question readings, there are cases where the two readings are predicted to have the same AP tonal pattern. However, our experimental results indicate that even in those cases a typical AP tonal contrast between the two question interpretations, i.e. the presence vs. absence of the tone in the syllable that immediately follows the wh-word, is observed in production and plays a meaningful role in perception. The results suggest that there is a production and processing strategy to utilize a consistent contrast in accentual phrasing between the two types of questions for disambiguation.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
  • 3.Production experiment
    • 3.1Overview and prediction
    • 3.2Method
      • 3.2.1Stimuli
      • 3.2.2Participants
      • 3.2.3Procedure
    • 3.3Results
      • 3.3.1IP boundary tone
      • 3.3.2Post-wh L tone
      • 3.3.3Pitch peak on the wh-word
      • 3.3.4Summary
  • 4.Perception experiment
    • 4.1Overview and predictions
    • 4.2Method
      • 4.2.1Stimuli
      • 4.2.2Participants
      • 4.2.2Procedure
    • 4.3Results
  • 5.Discussions
    • 5.1Post-wh AP tone in production: Phonetics or phonology?
    • 5.2Role of the intonational factors in Perception
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
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[no author supplied]
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