The prosody of enhanced bias in Mandarin and Japanese negative questions

Hara, Yurie; Kawahara, Shigeto; Yu, Feng

doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2014.07.006

Cited by 5 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 40 publications

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“…Second, we extend our research question to make a cross-linguistic comparison. Specifically, we ask whether English and Mandarin speakers respond differently to keywords in the instructions that are often assumed to be comparable to each other in empirical studies (Hara et al 2014, Xue et al 2020, Law & Syrett 2017.…”

Section: Instruction Variation Is Significantmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effects of instruction on semantic and pragmatic judgment tasks

Zhu

Ahn²

2023

ELM

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Sentence judgment tasks are used often in linguistics studies. However, there is no consensus on how significant the effect of instruction is in such tasks: some argue that instruction is trivial, while others argue that they affect the way participants respond. In this study, we investigate different keywords used in sentence judgment tasks and determine which keyword best teases apart speakers' response to semantically and pragmatically licit and illicit sentences. We test this in English and Mandarin, exploring the possibility of cross-linguistic variation on how speakers respond to different keywords. Our results show that the common keywords used in semantic and pragmatic judgment tasks such as 'natural' do distinguish semantic and pragmatic violations for English speakers, but that the common Mandarin translations of these words fail to distinguish between the two types of violations. Our results highlight the need for language- and study-specific norming procedures in sentence judgment tasks.

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Section: Instruction Variation Is Significantmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effects of instruction on semantic and pragmatic judgment tasks

Zhu

Ahn²

2023

ELM

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“…Prosodic coding of speaker commitment has been shown cross-linguistically for many utterance types: declaratives (Ward & Hirschberg, 1985, for American English; Gravano, Benuš, Hirschberg, German, & Ward, 2008, for American English; Portes & Lancia, 2017, for French); polar questions (Hirschberg & Ward, 1995, for American English; Hara, Kawahara, & Feng, 2014, for Mandarin and Japanese; Armstrong & Prieto, 2015; Armstrong, 2017, for Puerto Rican Spanish; Michelas, Portes, & Champagne-Lavau, 2015, for French; Vanrell, Ballone, Schirru, & Prieto, 2015, for Sardinian; Prieto & Borràs-Comes, 2018, for Central Catalan); imperatives (Armstrong & Lesho, 2017, for American English); and even vocatives (García, unpublished observations, for Asturian). Some of the earliest work applying the Autosegmental Metrical framework (Ward & Hirschberg, 1985, 1988; Hirschberg & Ward, 1985, 1992, 1995) references the importance of speaker belief state in prosodic meaning as well as the navigation of the mutual belief space (Pierrehumbert & Hirschberg, 1990).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Children's epistemic inferences through modal verbs and prosody

Armstrong

2020

J. Child Lang.

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This study explores how young children infer nuances in epistemic modality through prosody. A forced-choice task was used, testing children's (ages three to seven) comprehension of the might/will distinction (modal condition) as well their ability to modulate the strength of might through two prosodic tunes (prosody condition). Positive and negative valence conditions were included. Younger children were shown to start off performing above chance for the modal condition, and at around chance for the prosody condition, but after age four performance on the prosody condition quickly improved. For both modal verbs and prosody, children performed significantly better when valence was positive. By age seven, children performed at ceiling for all conditions. Qualitative analysis of children's justifications for prosody responses showed metalinguistic awareness of prosodic meaning as early as age four, with the ability to relate prosody to epistemic modal meaning becoming quite common by age seven.

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“…There is a growing literature illustrating the important role played by prosody in conveying a speaker’s degree of certainty about propositional content (Gravano, Benus, Hirschberg, German, & Ward, 2008 and Roseano, González, Borràs-Comes, & Prieto, 2016 for declaratives and interrogatives; Armstrong, 2015a, Armstrong & Prieto, 2015; Hara, Kawahara, & Feng, 2014; Michelas, Portes, & Champagne-Lavau, 2016; Vanrell, Mascaró, Torres-Tamarit, & Prieto 2013 for interrogatives), and thus the idea that epistemic information is signalled prosodically is less controversial. The use of epistemic intonation in questions has also been shown to have implications for intonational development (Armstrong, 2014, 2016).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Experimental Evidence for the Role of Intonation in Evidential Marking

2017

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This paper investigates the role of intonation in the marking of directly-perceived information in Majorcan Catalan polar questions. We conducted a perception experiment in which a total of 72 participants were introduced to a set of twins who were exposed to different types of evidence for a given p(roposition). One twin inferred p based on direct sensory information (via one of the five senses), while the other had been told that p by a third party, that is, reported information. Participants listened to a set of discourse contexts that ended in critical stimuli with three attested combinations of particle/intonation in this variety of Catalan: (1) polar questions produced with a falling nuclear contour ¡H+L* L%; (2) polar questions headed with the particle que 'that' produced with ¡H+L* L%; and (3) polar questions headed with the particle que and produced with a rise-fall L+H* L%. After hearing the stimulus, participants had to decide which of the twins had uttered the question-the one who inferred a proposition ( p) based on direct sensory information or the one who had been told p by a third party. The results show that listeners very consistently associate the que + L+H* L% combination with inferences drawn from direct sensory evidence as opposed to reported evidence. This shows that particles may work in tandem with intonation to convey the information source. Importantly, we show that intonation is a part of grammar that may be recruited for evidential strategies.

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The prosody of enhanced bias in Mandarin and Japanese negative questions

Cited by 5 publications

References 40 publications

Effects of instruction on semantic and pragmatic judgment tasks

Effects of instruction on semantic and pragmatic judgment tasks

Children's epistemic inferences through modal verbs and prosody

Experimental Evidence for the Role of Intonation in Evidential Marking

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