Appeals to prosody in Japanese Wh-interrogatives—Speakers’ versus listeners’ strategies

Kitagawa, Yoshihisa; Hirose, Yuki

doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2012.01.005

Cited by 8 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 29 publications

(22 reference statements)

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“…Since island effects in Korean can be tested only by examining speakers' interpretation of sentences (i.e., wh -scope), we will measure the felicity of Question-Answer pairs. Variants of this method have been used in several studies testing scope ambiguity of wh-in-situ (e.g., Pesetsky, 1987 ; Umeda, 2008 ; Kitagawa and Hirose, 2012 ). The specifics of the experimental design are as follows.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Islands and Non-islands in Native and Heritage Korean

Kim

Goodall

2016

Front. Psychol.

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To a large extent, island phenomena are cross-linguistically invariable, but English and Korean present some striking differences in this domain. English has wh-movement and Korean does not, and while both languages show sensitivity to wh-islands, only English has island effects for adjunct clauses. Given this complex set of differences, one might expect Korean/English bilinguals, and especially heritage Korean speakers (i.e., early bilinguals whose L2 became their dominant language during childhood) to be different from native speakers, since heritage speakers have had more limited exposure to Korean, may have had incomplete acquisition and/or attrition, and may show significant transfer effects from the L2. Here we examine islands in heritage speakers of Korean in the U.S. Through a series of four formal acceptability experiments comparing these heritage speakers with native speakers residing in Korea, we show that the two groups are remarkably similar. Both show clear evidence for wh-islands and an equally clear lack of adjunct island effects. Given the very different linguistic environment that the heritage speakers have had since early childhood, this result lends support to the idea that island phenomena are largely immune to environmental influences and stem from deeper properties of the processor and/or grammar. Similarly, it casts some doubt on recent proposals that islands are learned from the input.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Islands and Non-islands in Native and Heritage Korean

Kim

Goodall

2016

Front. Psychol.

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“…For example, “GREEN” facilitated looks to a picture of a green cat among other green-colored animals in the time interval before the head information (type of animal) became available, after participants responded to a trial when they heard “pink cat.” This is compelling evidence that listeners compute contrastive information as soon as the signal of focus-related pitch expansion becomes available, with a focus-eliciting context by the preceding trial. Further evidence comes from a study by Kitagawa and Hirose (2012). The study demonstrated that when Japanese listeners decide how to interpret ambiguous wh -scope (between a matrix and embedded clause), which will be disambiguated by the endpoint of the post-focal reduction domain (i.e., at the end of either the embedded or the matrix clause), they do not necessarily wait until the post-focus part of the sentence.…”

Section: Pitch Accent In Processing Spoken Japanesementioning

confidence: 99%

Sequential Interpretation of Pitch Prominence as Contrastive and Syntactic Information: Contrast Comes First, but Syntax Takes Over

Hirose

2019

Lang Speech

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Pitch accent serves multiple duties (encoding lexical accent, syntactic structure, and focus) in spoken Japanese. This study investigates how listeners interpret a role-ambiguous pitch prominence surfacing as F0 rise, which could be a cue to the resolution of a syntactic ambiguity between two possible branching structures, or a signal of contrastive focus on the constituent accompanied by the rise. Two visual world paradigm experiments tested the same Japanese linguistic stimuli with and without pitch emphasis on the second word of structures of the following form: modifier + N1 + N2. In Experiment 1, the visual context suppressed the availability of the contrastive interpretation; in Experiment 2, the visual context made the contrastive interpretation available. We found that the same pitch event can be interpreted as both syntax-encoding and contrast-encoding information within the course of processing the same sentence, as long as contextual information is made visually available. When contrastive focus is pragmatically felicitous, it is computed immediately, as soon as the incoming input is accompanied by a notable pitch prominence (Experiment 2). The same prosodic cue can then be re-interpreted as a signal to syntax after the branching ambiguity is recognized due to subsequent input (Experiments 1 and 2). This is most consistent with the view that an initially assigned prosodic boundary is exploited for re-interpretation.

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“…Comprehension of a sentence depends on several factors, such as the lexical content at a word level, the structure at a syntactic level, and the prosodic form in which it is delivered. Prosody may influence lexical and syntactic interpretations and may affect the resolution of lexical and syntactic ambiguities (e.g., Cooper & Paccia-Cooper, 1980;Kitagawa & Hirose, 2012;Stoyneshka et al, 2010). If someone says, I want chocolate cake and milk, with no prosodic boundary (a break in the continuum of the sentence) between chocolate and cake, it means she wants a piece of chocolate cake and milk.…”

Section: Prosodic Boundaries and Syntactic Disambiguationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Previous studies on prosody in CI users have focused primarily on lexical tones (Peng et al, 2017) and stimuli at word level, leaving prosody at the sentence level little understood. Many children with CIs have deficits in sentence comprehension (e.g., Caselli, Rinaldi, Varuzza, Giuliani, & Burdo, 2012;Tobey et al, 2013), but until now, prosody has not been considered as a factor in their syntactic deficits, despite its potential impact on language comprehension (e.g., Carlson, Clifton, & Frazier, 2001;Kitagawa & Hirose, 2012;Snedeker & Casserly, 2010;Stoyneshka, Fodor, & Fernández, 2010). This study examined whether children with CIs benefit from prosodic information in syntactic disambiguation.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%