@article{jbp:/content/journals/10.1075/ijchl.18004.yan, author = "Yang, Yang and Gryllia, Stella and Pablos, Leticia and Cheng, Lisa Lai-Shen", title = "Clause type anticipation based on prosody in Mandarin", journal= "International Journal of Chinese Linguistics", year = "2019", volume = "6", number = "1", pages = "1-26", doi = "https://doi.org/10.1075/ijchl.18004.yan", url = "https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/ijchl.18004.yan", publisher = "John Benjamins", issn = "2213-8706", type = "Journal Article", keywords = "prosody", keywords = "clause type anticipation", keywords = "clausal typing", keywords = "perception and gating paradigm", keywords = "Mandarin wh-declarative/wh-question", abstract = "Abstract

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.", }