Perceiving and Modeling the Scope of Question Focus in Korean

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Psycholinguistics
• Phonetics

Background:

• The role of prosody in disambiguating Korean questions with indefinite content pro-forms is debated.
• Expanded F0 range at the focus site is a potential prosodic cue for question types.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the prosodic contribution to disambiguating open and polar questions in Korean.
• To examine how listeners interpret indefinite content pro-forms (e.g., "who/someone") based on prosody.

Main Methods:

• A pilot experiment followed by a large-scale online speech perception gating study (n=124).
• Manipulation of natural prosody in identical Korean strings presented as statements, open questions, or polar questions.

Main Results:

• A general tendency for all question types to be perceived as open questions, irrespective of prosody.
• Open questions were reliably distinguished, with no significant effect of prosodic manipulation.
• Polar questions showed a significant prosodic effect (p < .001), but were not identified above chance even with natural prosody.

Conclusions:

• In the absence of context, Korean listeners strongly prefer interpreting content pro-forms as question words.
• Prosodic information may be disregarded once an initial interpretation is made.
• Findings impact formal models of the Korean syntax-prosody interface.