Browse by author
Lookup NU author(s): Dr Cong Zhang
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
© The Author(s) 2026. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).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 (Formula presented) 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 (Formula presented) 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.
Author(s): Jones S, Kim Y, Zhang C
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Language and Speech
Year: 2026
Pages: Epub ahead of print
Online publication date: 09/04/2026
Acceptance date: 14/01/2026
Date deposited: 21/04/2026
ISSN (print): 0023-8309
ISSN (electronic): 1756-6053
Publisher: Sage
URL: https://doi.org/10.1177/00238309261419
DOI: 10.1177/00238309261419
Altmetrics provided by Altmetric
