Linguistic studies of the intonation of Yes-No questions in French show that, in questions containing more than two stress groups, interrogative intonation is characterized by a sequence of lowered pitches or downstepped tones which precede the final rise. The gating paradigm was used here to determine whether subjects listening to French NP utterances containing three stress groups could indicate whether the utterance was an statement or a question before the final rise was heard. Although the task was difficult, findings indicate that listeners can in fact to a certain extent, recognize with mid confidence ratings, the intonational device of a question while they were hearing the downstepped tones preceding the final rise.

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This study deals with the use of connectives in oral French narration. Seven-to eleven-year-old native speakers of French told 'silent' comic strip stories involving two characters to a same-age peer. The comic strips differed from each other in the display mode (consecutive vs. simultaneous), the type of event sequence (arbitrary vs. ordered) and the thematic continuity (continuous vs. discontinuous). The analysis concerns the part of the children's narrations where the same character carried out a sequence of actions. The results showed that: (1) more connectives were used when the speaker could see all the pictures at once; (2) regardless of the type of sequence, connectives that marked a temporal link outnumbered all others; and (3) thematic continuity promoted temporal-link marking by 7-year-olds and causal-link marking by 11-year-olds. The discussion addresses the conceptual determinants of the use of connectives, particularly temporal markers, and the developmental findings obtained by manipulating the conditions of production.