THE DEVELOPMENT OF YES-NO QUESTION INTONATION IN PUERTO RICAN SPANISH DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Meghan Elizabeth Armstrong Graduate Program in Spanish and Portuguese The Ohio State University 2012 Dissertation Committee: Professor Scott A. Schwenter, Co-advisor Professor Pilar Prieto Vives, Co-advisor Professor Cynthia Clopper Professor John Grinstead Copyright by Meghan Elizabeth Armstrong 2012 Abstract Intonational development has been an area of interest during the past four decades, from the perspectives of both production and perception. But relatively few conclusions have been made about how children acquire the intonational component of their grammar. To date, prior studies of intonational development have not included a fine-grained pragmatic analysis of the types of intentions that may be encoded intonationally in a given language. This dissertation takes an integrated approach to the study of intonational development within the domain of yes- no questions. Very recent studies of intonational development have successfully used the Autosegmental-Metrical (AM) framework in order to capture the intonational categories acquired by children. From the phonological side, I use the AM model to assess how children acquire the target intonational categories available for yes-no questions in Puerto Rican Spanish (PRS). In addition to discussing the phonological aspect of this learning problem, I argue that an understanding of the fine-grained pragmatic nuances in the child’s ambient language are essential if we are to predict which intonational forms will or will not emerge at specific stages in child speech. In this dissertation, I consider three types of speech: adult-directed, child- directed (CDS) and child speech. This is done from a speaker perspective (production), as well as a hearer perspective (perception). Results from a production study for adult speech revealed that within the yes-no question domain, PRS has a default yes-no question contour (¡H* L% in the Sp_ToBI system for prosodic transcription), as well as two additional contours (H+L* L% and L* HL%). H+L* L% shows a ii positive belief value with respect to propositional content ([+belief]), while L* HL% shows a disbelief value with respect to propositional content ([-belief]). The latter two contours are chosen when the speaker wishes to convey information about his/her belief state with respect to propositional content, and I therefore refer to them as epistemic contours. A perception experiment confirmed that in neutral contexts, H+L* L% and L* HL% are perceived as carrying epistemic bias. The default contour (¡H* L%) carries no bias in neutral contexts, but takes on contextual bias. The perception experiment also demonstrated that there were differences in the ways the default versus epistemic contours were perceived when they were heard in biased (rather than neutral) contexts. Discourse context was found to have a strong effect on the belief state that participants inferred for the default contour. For epistemic contours, the presence of the linguistically encoded epistemic information sometimes weakened the effect of the discourse context. It was also shown that hearers may integrate discourse context and epistemic information in the contour for specialized meanings when they are available. The child production data examined in this dissertation are from a longitudinal database of speech from two female PRS-acquiring children between the ages of 19 and 42 months, and their caretakers. Analysis of all yes-no questions produced during this time period for both children and caretakers showed that the default contour (¡H* L%) is heavily favored in both child-directed speech (CDS) and child speech. The default contour was by far the most frequently used contour in CDS, and was used almost categorically in child speech. On the other hand, epistemic contours were found to be relatively low frequency in CDS. The frequency relationship for contour types for CDS was ¡H* L%>L* HL%>H+L* L%. The relationship in frequency between L* HL% and H+L* L% was perhaps due to the fact the [-belief] contour (L* iii HL%) has very specific CDS functions that weren’t found for H+L* L%. Such CDS-specific functions include use of the contour to encourage a child to reformulate a mistaken answer, or to convey to the child that the information they have contributed to the common ground is very interesting or novel. However, it was found that for epistemic contours, frequency does not predict the order of emergence of epistemic contours in child speech. Only the [+belief] contour emerges in child speech, with very few tokens. I argue that the [-belief] contour’s meaning is more complex and pragmatically restricted than the [+belief] contour, accounting for the non- appearance of the [-belief] contour. Additionally, the two children in the study do show evidence that they recognize the interrogativity component of all three contours, demonstrating partial comprehension of the functions of the epistemic contours. This is taken as evidence that children may learn about the information encoded through intonation incrementally, that is, they may acquire some but not all components of the contour’s meaning. Therefore, in addition to frequency, I consider both the notions of complexity and incrementality as relevant aspects to consider in a child’s intonational development. Lastly, a perception study investigating how 4- to 6-year-olds comprehend the most complex contour, the [-belief] contour, demonstrated that 4- and 5- year olds are above chance at comprehending the contour’s meaning. 6-year-olds perform in an even more adult-like way than 4- and 5-year-olds. Linguistic comprehension of the [-belief] contour is present at the same ages for which earlier studies have shown evidence for linguistic comprehension of epistemic modal verbs. Taken together, the results presented in this dissertation highlight how important it is to clearly define the form-meaning relationships in the adult system if we are to fully understand iv how intonation will be developed in child speech. The function of the intonational form is key in understanding when it will be produced and comprehended. v For Kira - you are missed. vi Acknowledgments I thank my co-advisor Dr. Scott Schwenter, without whom I would probably have never come to Ohio State. Dr. Schwenter has prepared me as a researcher by helping me understand how to approach problems at the interfaces in creative ways. He has always shown faith in my ideas and encouraged me to pursue them (while at the same time reminding me to control them!). I thank my co-advisor Pilar Prieto for providing me with the opportunity to spend almost two years working with her group at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. Dr. Prieto’s attention and dedication to her students is truly exceptional and I feel lucky to have been given the privilege to work with her. Regardless of the many projects she was involved in or where she was, Dr. Prieto always made it a priority to provide me with insightful feedback on my work, and for this I am truly appreciative. I am indebted to my committee members Dr. Cynthia Clopper and Dr. John Grinstead. I thank Dr. Clopper for her accessibility and impeccable eye for detail. Dr. Clopper was always available to me throughout my career at OSU, and I admire both her teaching skills and adeptness for working with students. She has helped me in many ways. I am also grateful to Dr. Grinstead for his availability and feedback throughout my time at OSU. In addition to being a wonderful mentor, Dr. Grinstead provided much-needed moral support at the times I most needed it. I have a great deal of respect for Dr. Grinstead both on an academic and personal level. Dr. Laura Wagner was also very instrumental in much of this work. I learned from every vii single one of my meetings with Dr. Wagner. Her ability see the story in the data is truly amazing and I am grateful for all the time she devoted to me throughout my time at OSU. I am also thankful to the many professors in the Department of Linguistics at OSU who were so patient with me: Mary Beckman, Beth Hume, Shari Speer and Don Winford. I thank the members of Lacqueys and Phonies for their insightful feedback on my work throughout the years. Thanks also to the grad students in the Linguistics Department, especially Jeff Holiday and Abby Walker. I thank the faculty at the University of Maryland who made a difference during my undergrad experience: Phyllis Peres, José María Naharro Calderón, Regina Igel and Manel Lacorte. Dr. Peres first suggested the idea of graduate school about five years before I really comprehended what it was (and that I should go). I thank Dr. Lacorte for helping me to understand what exactly it was I was interested in, where to go to study it and why. I doubt I would have known how to embark on this journey without Dr. Lacorte’s guidance. The data analyzed in this dissertation come from three trips to Puerto Rico, as well as an experiment for which data was collected online. The trips to Puerto Rico were funded with a Small Research Grant from the Ohio State University Graduate School, an International Affairs Grant from the OSU Office of International Affairs and a generous Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant from the National Science Foundation. My time in Barcelona working with Dr. Prieto was funded by a CONSOLIDER-INGENIO Grant (Spanish Ministry of Education and Science), a Presidential Fellowship from the Ohio State University Graduate School and partly by the aforementioned Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant from the National Science Foundation.