Disambiguate or not? The role of prosody in unambiguous and potentially ambiguous anaphora production in strictly Mandarin parallel structures

It has been observed that the interpretation of pronouns can
depend on their accentuation patterns in parallel sentences as
“John hit Bill and then George hit him”, in which ‘him’ refers
to Bill when unaccented but shifts to John when accented.
While accentuation is widely regarded as a means of
disambiguation, some studies have noticed that it also extends
to unambiguous anaphors [7-10]. From the perspective of
production, however, no strong experimental confirmation was
found for the ‘shift’ function of accented pronouns, which is
due to the fact that production research has mainly focused on
corpora [5, 6]. Hence, the nature of the accent on anaphors still
remains obscure. By manipulating referential shift and
ambiguity, this study explores the role of prosody in anaphora
production in strictly Mandarin parallel structures. The results
reveal a significantly higher F0 and longer duration for
anaphors in referentially shifted conditions, suggesting that
anaphoric accentuation signals a referential change in strictly
parallel structures in Mandarin. No evidence was found that
ambiguity plays a role in anaphoric accentuation. This finding
challenges the general view on accented pronouns and will
deepen our understanding on semantics-prosody relationship.