The present study aims to investigate the effects of the intonations on the syntactic interpretation of the interrogatives with a wh-expression in the Daegu-North Gyeongsang Korean and the Seoul metropolitan Korean. To this end, it analyzes the syntactic and prosodic structures of the interrogatives with an embedded wh-clause or a yes/no-question with an indefinite pronoun. Two types of perception tests, one with unmodified intonations and the other with transplanted intonations, were carried out to analyze the respondents’ interpretations of the three types of the interrogatives. The results of the test with unmodified intonations were as follows. First, more than 90% of the respondents chose appropriate answers to the three types of the wh-interrogatives with no statistically significant differences. Second, the respondents’ reaction times demonstrated with statistically significant differences that the processing load of wh-questions with matrix scope was heavier than that of wh questions with narrow scope or yes-no questions with an indefinite pronoun. Third, embedding verbs of the question-selecting predicate class such as gunggeumhada ‘wonder’ led to longer reaction time than those of the proposition-selecting predicate class such as saenggakada ‘think’. In addition, the results of the perception test with transplanted prosodies revealed two decisive factors. First, the interrogative-endings -ka/na were more influential factors in the respondents’ syntactic interpretations of wh-questions than the other endings such as –ko/no or the prosodies were. Second, wh-questions with such embedding verbs as saenggakada ‘think’ were interpreted in close accordance with the transplanted prosodic structures, but not so much so in the case of wh-questions with such embedding verbs as gunggeumhada ‘wonder’ irrespective of the prosody transplants.

Morphosyntactic and prosodic information is accessed by native speakers of North Gyeongsang Korean when interrogatives are interpreted. The present study investigates the interface between these structures. To do so, the study analyzes the syntactic and prosodic structures of the dialect’s yes/no and wh-questions, and then examines the rate of comprehension and acceptance of the two types of the interrogatives in a perception test. The prosodic structures in the test are modified by transplantation, the results of which allow us to find out the following. First, presented with the interrogatives whose syntactic and prosodic structures did not match, the native subjects of Gyeongsang Korean relied more on the prosodic structures than on the syntactic ones. Second, changes in prosodic structures had a strong influence on simple sentences, but relatively less so on complex sentences. These results lead to the conclusion that prosodic structures are the decisive factor in syntactic interpretations, and, accordingly, are intricately intertwined with the syntactic structures during the processing of interrogatives.