2018 Friday Poster 6686
Friday, November 2, 2018 | Poster Session I, Metcalf Small | 3pm
Effect of intonation contour on scope: hat vs. neutral contours in German
K. Yatsushiro, A. Sugawara, U. Sauerland
Children up to 5-6 years old have difficulties incorporating prosodic information for syntactic ambiguity resolution (Snedeker and Yuan 2008 and others) and contrastive focus (Sekerina and Trueswell 2012). Gao et al. (2018) shows, however, that young children successfully distinguish two types of speech acts, disam- biguated by prosody. In this paper, we consider another area where prosody disambiguates the sentences: scope relations.
Jacobs (1984), following Jackendoff (1972), observes that a universal quantifier in subject position interacts scopaly with negation in a sentence like (1), with a neutral intonation contour in German. When produced with a special contour (the hat intonation contour; Jacobs 1984), however, only the inverse scope interpre- tation is available. According to Büring (1997), this is because the hat-contour leads to an implicature of uncertainty: there has to be an alternative that is not resolved. With all-not sentences, only the inverse scope interpretation satisfies this property, and therefore, is available.
We compared the effect of intonation on the scope relation between two scope taking items: (i) in subject and (all-not), and (ii) subject and object (two-Q(uantifiers)). Previous studies have found that children show more limited scope interpretations than adults (Musolino and Lidz 2006 among others.) In addition, children show limited sensitivity to contrastive topic intonation (Gualmini et al. (2003)), predicting that children may not show sensitivity to the hat-contour.
Experiment: Sentence picture matching task Participants first heard a short story, then the test sentence (e.g., (2)), while looking at four pictures ((3)). One of the pictures matched the surface scope interpretation, another matched the inverse scope. We created two lists, each using only one of the contours.
42 monolingual German speaking children (3;6-6;11, M=5;1) participated in this study. 22 children were tested with the neutral intonation contour, and 20 children with the hat intonation contour. 10 adult speakers were tested as a control group.
Result Adults showed the expected effect of intonation on scopal construal with all-not sentences: (i) pref- erence for the surface scope (59.4% vs. inverse scope 40.6%) with the neutral contour; (ii) preference for the inverse scope (the surface scope 31.3% vs. the inverse scope 68.7%) with the hat contour. Adults chose the surface scope picture 100% of the time with both contours for two-Q items.
Children showed similar patterns: preference for the surface scope (67.6% vs. 24.4%) with the neutral contour; preference for the inverse scope (surface 34.4% vs. 53.7%) with the hat contour. With the two-Q sentences, children showed strong preference for the surface scope with both intonation contours (neutral: 58.3% vs. 25.0%, hat: 67.6% vs. 15%). The difference in ratio of choosing two types of pictures between two contours was significant (Fisher’s exact test: p <0.01) for all-not, but not for two-Q items.
Discussion Our data show that children are sensitive to hat intonation, even though for other types of into- nation children’s knowledge of their effect has been difficult to establish. We conclude that children fully know the semantics and pragmatics underlying the interaction of scope and hat intonation.
References
Büring, Daniel. 1997. The great scope inversion conspiracy. Linguistics and Philosophy 20:175–194.
Gao, Na, Rosalind Thornton, Peng Zhou, and Stephen Crain. 2018. Differences in scope assignments for child and adult speakers of mandarin. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research .
Gualmini, Andrea, Simona Maciukaite, and Stephen Crain. 2003. Children’s insensitivity to contrastive stress in sentences with only. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 8:8.
Jacobs, J. 1984. Funktionale satzperspektive und illokutionssemantic. Linguistische Berichte .
Musolino, Julien, and Jeffrey Lidz. 2006. Why children aren’t universally successful with quantification.
Linguistics 44:817–852.
Sekerina, Irina A., and John C. Trueswell. 2012. Interactive processing of contrastive expression by russian children. First Language 32:63–87.
Snedeker, Jesse, and Sylvia Yuan. 2008. Effects of prosodic and lexical constraints on parsing in young children (and adults). Journal of memory and language 58:574–608.