Appeals to prosody in Japanese Wh-interrogatives—Speakers’ versus listeners’ strategies

The present study examines how Wh-interrogative sentences in Japanese are produced and comprehended when they involve potentially ambiguous Wh-scope interpretations. Two experiments were conducted: one eliciting utterances from native speakers and the other testing the comprehension of resynthesized sound stimuli. The results reveal the existence of a puzzling asymmetry between production and comprehension as well as an asymmetry between matrix and subordinate Wh-scope comprehension. Speakers mainly make use of the pitch of the item immediately following the subordinate complementizer to encode distinct Wh-scope interpretations. Listeners, on the other hand, rely more heavily on the pitch of a subordinate-clause Wh-item to decode its scope interpretation, especially when the matrix Wh-scope interpretation is detected. Potential sources of the speaker–listener discrepancy are identified, and it is argued that this discrepancy contributes to the difficulty of the matrix scope interpretation of an “in-situ” Wh-phrase located within an embedded Wh-clause.

► Speaker–listener asymmetry in prosodic encoding of scope for subordinate Wh-in-situ.
► Speakers rely on the “post-COMP pitch” to encode distinct Wh-scope interpretations.
► Listeners rely more on the pitch of the subordinate Wh-item to decode its scope.
► Listeners crucially rely on the pitch of a Wh-item for detecting matrix Wh-scope.
► The asymmetry contributes to Subjacency effects of a Wh-in-situ within a Wh-clause.