A Prosodic Analysis of Three Types of Wh-Phrases in Korean

Wh-phrases in Korean are ambiguous due to the lexical ambiguity of "wh" words: wh-pronouns as in a wh-question, or indefinite pronouns as in a yes/no-question. Furthermore, since a wh-word in Korean is in-situ (i.e. not moved to the front of a sentence as in English), wh-questions are not distinguished from echo questions in their surface forms. In this paper, we investigated prosodic characteristics disambiguating these three types of wh-phrases: 1) wh-question, 2) yes/no-question, and 3) incredulity question, a kind of echo question giving an incredulity meaning. Production and perception data were examined to discover what prosodic features are used to distinguish these three types of wh-phrases and which feature is more salient and reliable in perceiving such differences. The production results show that yes/no-questions and other types of questions are distinguished by different accentual phrasing, while incredulity and wh-questions are distinguished by different peak amplitudes, pitch ranges, and boundary tones. Interestingly, not all speakers used the same strategy to distinguish incredulity from wh-questions. The results of the perception test suggest that accentual phrasing is significantly related to the perception of three types while amplitude and boundary tones are significantly related to the perception of wh- and incredulity questions, respectively.