A case for systematic sound symbolism in pragmatics: The role of the first phoneme in question prediction in context
Keywords
Loading...
Authors
Issue Date
2016-09-15
Language
en
Document type
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Title
ISSN
Volume
Issue
Startpage
Endpage
DOI
Abstract
Conversation is a socially and cognitively demanding endeavour in which interlocutors have to continuously monitor what is being said in order to react fast and appropriately. This is even more demanding with questions as they put an obligation on an addressee to respond. In the present study we investigated whether the first phoneme of question words helps in predicting an incoming turn as a question.
Importantly, given that conversation always occurs in context, we investigated how the type of previous sequential turn influences question recognition.
We addressed this topic by first investigating the hypotheses in naturally occurring conversations in a corpus. Then, we tested these findings in a controlled setting. In the corpus study we used the method of the decision trees to assess the influence of the first phoneme and the context on probability of an incoming turn being a question. In the experimental study, we designed a behavioural task in which participants had to predict an incoming turn once they heard the recording (from the same corpus) of the previous turn and the first segment of an incoming turn.
Both studies confirmed that the first phoneme of an incoming turn and the context play a role in question prediction. Namely, we found that if an incoming turn starts with a phoneme from question words (i.e., /w/ in English), participants are more likely to think that an incoming turn is a question in comparison to other phoneme or no phonemic cue at all. Also, questions are expected more, if a turn is preceded by a non-initiating turn in comparison to an initiating turn. Interestingly, the corpus study suggests that the phoneme is the strongest factor in question recognition and also that this effect should be stronger in non-initiating context. Nevertheless, in the experiment we find that context is a stronger factor than phoneme and there is no significant interaction between phoneme and context, even though the trend is in the predicted direction.
The present study provides the first support for the hypothesis that early phonemic cue plays a role in question recognition, also with context available. Moreover, this is the first study to approach this phenomenon in ecologically valid and controlled ways. Both similarities and differences in the results from both studies highlight the importance of such approach in research.
Description
Citation
Supervisor
Faculty
Faculteit der Letteren