Use of prosodic and lexical cues for disambiguating wh-words in Korean

Abstract

Previous research has shown that the ambiguity of wh-words in Korean can be resolved by prosody. The present study investigated the interplay between prosody and lexical cues in disambiguation. Our written survey results showed that the use of certain adverbs (e.g., a little, once) with a wh-word increases the likelihood of a yes-no question interpretation. The results of our speech production experiment found an interaction of lexical and prosodic cues in the disambiguation. In particular, the presence of a lexical cue affected speakers' phrasing choice, but not the type of Intonational Phrase (IP) boundary tones or acoustic prominence. The finding supports the proposal that speech production is affected by the amount of linguistic information available for speakers. We further suggest how the phrasing structure could affect speakers' choice of the IP boundary tone in Korean.