Building bridges: The role of prosody in Mandarin-speaking adults' and children's anaphora resolution

Abstract

Past research on the role of prosody in reference is primarily concerned with how adults and children use prosodic cues to signal accessibility change from givenness to newness of the same noun phrase. This study explores the role of prosody in the referential dependencies between one antecedent noun-phrase and one reflexive anaphor ‘zi-ji’ (oneself) in Mandarin-speaking adults and children. In sentences like “Boris dreamed that Miffy painted ‘zi-ji’”, ‘zi-ji’ can establish two types of anaphor-antecedent dependencies: (1) a local dependency where ‘zi-ji’ refers to Miffy, (2) a non-local dependency where ‘zi-ji’ refers to Boris. Such sentences were elicited in both interpretations from Mandarin-speaking adults and 6 to 10-year-olds in a picture-matching game. Duration analysis on ‘zi-ji’ shows that adults produced ‘zi-ji’ with a longer duration in the non-local dependency condition than in the local dependency condition. This result can be explained by the economy hierarchy model, whereby the local antecedent made more accessible by the locality constraint is preferred, thus necessitating the use of more prosodic prominence to mark the less accessible non-local antecedent. This pattern was not found in children’s production, suggesting prolonged acquisition of using prosody to build anaphor-antecedent dependencies for ‘zi-ji’.