What prosody does when morphosyntax is absent: The case of Korean relative clauses

Authors

  • Jinyoung Jo University of California, Los Angeles
  • Juyeon Cho University of Delaware
  • Sanghee J. Kim University of Chicago
  • Sun-Ah Jun University of California, Los Angeles

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v9i1.5719

Keywords:

ambiguity resolution, syntax-prosody interface, non-restrictive relative clause, restrictive relative clause, Korean, language comprehension

Abstract

This study investigates the role of prosodic information in linguistic interpretation in the absence of an explicit linguistic marker to resolve ambiguity. We particularly focus on the impact of prosody on comprehension of restrictive relative clauses (RRC) and non-restrictive relative clauses (NRC) in Korean, a language that lacks morphosyntactic or orthographic markers that distinguish between RRC and NRC. We hypothesize that narrow focus prosody may be associated with RRC, while broad focus prosody with NRC, which we test in two experiments through a picture selection task (Experiment 1) and an audio selection task (Experiment 2). Results showed that Korean listeners associated narrow focus prosody more often with RRC-biased pictures than NRC-biased pictures, suggesting that prosodic information has an impact on the resolution of syntactic ambiguity in the absence of any explicit linguistic marker. Further investigation suggests that there is variation in the impact of prosody across individuals and their sensitivity to prosody seems to be affected differently depending on the type of task.

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Published

2024-05-15

How to Cite

Jo, Jinyoung, Juyeon Cho, Sanghee J. Kim, and Sun-Ah Jun. 2024. “What Prosody Does When Morphosyntax Is Absent: The Case of Korean Relative Clauses”. Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America 9 (1): 5719. https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v9i1.5719.