Boundary tones in production and comprehension of in pro-drop language: the case of Korean

Abstract

This paper investigates if boundary tones have either a gradient or a categorical indication of structural phrasing. The role of prosody in syntactic disambiguation has been well documented and a recent study showed Korean speakers use the presence and absence of boundary tones to disambiguate a null-argument sentence borne out of double nominative construction in Korean (Ahn, 2011). Two experiments show that boundary tones play an important role both in comprehension and in production in spoken Korean. In Experiment 1, speakers read a paragraph including contexts and the critical sentence given in a latin-square design. The critical sentences in this production experiment include both null-argument and non-null-argument sentences to see if the use of boundary tones is for addressees or for the speaker himself. In Experiment 2, participants judge the naturalness of null-argument sentences given in contexts and answer comprehension questions probing if they got the correct reading of the two ambiguous interpretations. The results show a clear interaction effect of prosody and structure on the accuracy to the comprehension questions. A gradient-categorical dichotomy of prosody in sentence processing will be discussed and suggestions for a further study will be made to investigate the relationship of boundary tones and comprehension.