Syntax and prosody interface of Wh-Scope in mandarin

This study mainly investigates prosodic strategies to disambiguate the ambiguous wh-scope in Mandarin. We also examine the usage of prosodic information in production and perception as well as the relationship between prosody and syntax regarding to wh-scope by conducting a series of four experiments. The results of these experiments show that Mandarin speakers put focused intonation on different lexical items among wh-phrases, embedded verbs and matrix verbs according to the wh-scope. The mismatch between speakers’ encoding and hearers’ decoding of prosodic information were also found in these experiments. The prosodic information does not play a crucial role in disambiguating wh-scope in perception. In addition, we found that Mandarin speakers use different prosodic strategies depending on the amount of given syntactic information on wh-scope. This suggests that syntax affects prosody on wh-scope.