Clause type anticipation based on prosody in Mandarin

Abstract Mandarin wh -words such as shénme are wh -indeterminates, which can have interrogative interpretations (‘what’) or non-interrogative interpretations (i.e., ‘something’), depending on the context and licensors. For example, when diǎnr (‘a little’) appears right in front of a wh -word, the string can have either a wh -question or a declarative interpretation (henceforth, wh -declarative). Yang (2018) carried out a production study and the results showed that wh -questions and wh -declaratives have different prosodic properties. To investigate whether and when listeners make use of prosody to anticipate the clause type (i.e., question vs. declarative), we conducted a sentence perception study and an audio-gating experiment. Results of the perception study and the gating experiment show that (1) Participants can make use of prosody to differentiate the two clause types; (2) Starting from the onset of the first word of the target sentence ( wh -question/ wh -declarative), participants already demonstrate a preference for the clause type that was intended by the speaker. The current study also sheds light on the clausal typing mechanism in Mandarin (e.g., how to mark a clause as a wh -question) by providing evidence of the role of prosody in marking clause types in Mandarin.