Perceiving and Modeling the Scope of Question Focus in Korean

The precise nature of the prosodic contribution to disambiguating open and polar questions with indefinite content pro-forms in Korean (e.g., nwukwu "who/someone") remains a matter of debate. One possible relevant prosodic feature is expanded F0 range at the site of question focus. We report the results of a pilot experiment followed by a large-scale online speech perception gating study $\left(n=124\right)$ that manipulated the natural prosody of identical strings read as statements or open or polar questions. We found a tendency for all questions to be perceived as open questions, regardless of prosody. Open questions were reliably disambiguated from other utterance types, and there was no effect of the prosodic manipulation. Polar questions did show a significant effect of the prosodic manipulation $\left(p<.001\right),$ but even with full natural prosody, these stimuli were never correctly identified above chance levels. We suggest that in the absence of context, there is a strong preference for hearers to interpret content pro-forms as question words, and that subsequent prosodic information may be discounted if a hearer has already committed to their interpretation. The present findings have implications for formal accounts of the Korean syntax-prosody interface.