The Role of Prosody in the Identification of Persian Sentence Types: Declarative or Wh-question?

Abstract

It has been reported that prosody contributes to the identification of utterances which lack lexico-syntactic indicators of interrogativity but do have characteristic prosodic correlates (e.g. Vion and Colas 2006. Pitch cues for the recognition of yes-no questions in French. Journal of Psycholinguistics . In Persian wh-in-situ questions, the interrogativity device (the wh-phrase) does not move to the sentence-initial position, and the pre-wh part is characterized by specific prosodic correlates (Shiamizadeh et al. 2016. Do Persian native speakers prosodically mark wh-in-situ questions? Manuscript submitted for publication). The current experiment investigates the role of prosody in the perception of Persian wh-in-situ questions as opposed to declaratives. To this end, an experiment was designed in which Persian native speakers were asked to choose the correct sentence type after hearing only the pre-wh part of a sentence. We hypothesized that prosody guides perception of wh-in-situ questions independent of wh-phrase type. The results of the experiment corroborate our hypothesis. The outcome is discussed in terms of Ohala´s frequency code, and Bolinger´s claim about the universal dichotomous association between relaxation and declarativity on the one hand and tension and interrogativity on the other hand.

When is a wh-in-situ question identified in standard Persian?

“…Response accuracy to declaratives was shown to be higher than response accuracy to questions. Higher response accuracy to declaratives has been reported in earlier perception studies (Shiamizadeh et al, 2017a;Vion & Colas, 2006). In line with the results of other perception studies on the role of prosody in sentence type identification (Shiamizadeh et al, 2017a;Shiamizadeh, Caspers, & Schiller, 2017b;Vion & Colas, 2006), declaratives also have shorter reaction times in comparison to questions.…”

“…Higher response accuracy to declaratives has been reported in earlier perception studies (Shiamizadeh et al, 2017a;Vion & Colas, 2006). In line with the results of other perception studies on the role of prosody in sentence type identification (Shiamizadeh et al, 2017a;Shiamizadeh, Caspers, & Schiller, 2017b;Vion & Colas, 2006), declaratives also have shorter reaction times in comparison to questions. A possible reason for the decreased RTs and the higher response accuracy to declaratives could be the higher frequency of declaratives in comparison to questions in daily conversation (as suggested by Van Heuven and Haan (2000) and Vion and Colas (2006)).…”

“…Following the production study, Shiamizadeh et al (2017a) ran a perception experiment to investigate whether prosodic correlates of the pre-wh part of a sentence can cue correct identification of Persian wh-in-situ questions as opposed to declaratives in the absence of the wh-phrase at the sentence-initial position. A sentence identification task was designed in which the pre-wh part of wh-in-situ questions and their matching declaratives were presented to the participants at once (one-time stimulus presentation).…”

“…In the perception study by Shiamizadeh et al (2017a) the pre-wh part was presented to the participants based on one-time stimulus presentation (cf. Section 1.1.2).…”

“…In other words, the earlier the listeners can predict the syntactic structure of the sentence the more time they will have to prepare a response. The results of the perception study by Shiamizadeh, Caspers, and Schiller (2017a) suggest that the prosody of the pre-wh part of a sentence can help predict sentence type (wh-in-situ questions vs. declaratives) in Persian in the absence of the wh-phrase at the sentence-initial position (see Section 1.1.2). The result of that perception study raises a new question: where in the pre-wh part does the relevant distinctive prosodic information become available to feed the process of sentence type prediction?…”