Children's Sensitivity to Prosody and Ostension in Answers to WhQuestions
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Children\'s Sensitivity to Prosody and Ostension
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Children\'s Sensitivity To Prosody And Ostension
Children's Sensitivity to Prosody and Ostension in Answers to WhQuestions
Bethany Stoddard
Goethe Universität
Jill de Villiers
Smith College,
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Part of the Linguistics Commons, and the Philosophy Commons
Recommended Citation
Stoddard, Bethany an...
Children's Sensitivity to Prosody and Ostension in Answers to Wh-
Questions
Bethany Stoddard
Goethe Universität
Jill de Villiers
Smith College, jdevilli@smith.edu
Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.smith.edu/phi_facpubs
Part of the Linguistics Commons, and the Philosophy Commons
Recommended Citation
Stoddard, Bethany and de Villiers, Jill, "Children's Sensitivity to Prosody and Ostension in Answers to Wh-
Questions" (2021). Philosophy: Faculty Publications, Smith College, Northampton, MA.
https://scholarworks.smith.edu/phi_facpubs/38
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administrator of Smith ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact scholarworks@smith.edu
, BUCLD 45 Proceedings
To be published in 2021 by Cascadilla Press
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Children's Sensitivity to Prosody and Ostension in Answers to
Wh-Questions.
Bethany Stoddard and Jill de Villiers
1. Introduction**
This paper examines the effects of two often overlooked factors in children’s
answers to wh-questions: the prosodic contour of the question and the complexity
of the visual stimuli. There are two potential effects on the interpretation of a
question in English: whether it is moved, and what kind of prosody it has. In
English, the usual form of a wh-question has a wh-question moved to the front
(1), in Spec CP. In such a case, the nuclear contour is usually falling:
(1) What did the woman buy?
In the case where the wh-question is stressed, the question has a rising nuclear
contour:
(2) What did the woman buy?
In a third variety, the wh-word remains in situ, is stressed, and there is a rising
nuclear contour:
(3) The woman bought what?
A 2010 corpus study of American English by Hedberg et al. examined
prosody in adults’ production of moved wh-questions and its relation to each
question’s pragmatic function in the discourse. They found that wh-questions
have a falling nuclear contour 81% of the time, and a rising nuclear contour 18%
of the time (Hedberg et al., 2010). Their results showed that falling questions are
typically used to get more information about a topic, to introduce a subtopic, or
to influence the discussion of the current topic. Rising questions, on the other
hand, behave much more like wh-in-situ echo questions, and are used to ask for
background information or to clarify information that was not heard. Are children
*
Bethany Stoddard, Lab for German as a Second Language, Goethe Universität
Frankfurt, Germany, bethstoddard1@gmail.com. This work was completed as part of a
BA honors thesis in Linguistics at Smith College.
*
Jill de Villiers, Psychology Department, Smith College, Northampton, MA 01063.
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