We report three experiments that assess whether structural priming in a question-answer dialogue context is affected by the use of direct requests, conventional indirect requests, and nonconventional indirect requests. In Experiments 1 and 2, experimenters made phone calls to businesses and asked either "Can you tell me (at) what time you…

The detrimental consequences of suggestive witness manipulation have been frequently discussed in the literature. Notably, these discussions have been limited to the consequences of suggestive question types and interrogator conduct. This study is the first to investigate the influence of interrogator's intonation on interrogative suggestibility.…

Terminal changes in fundamental frequency provide the most salient acoustic cues to declarative questions, but adults sometimes identify such questions from pre-terminal cues. In the present study, adults and 7- to 10-year-old children judged a single speaker's adult- and child-directed utterances as questions or statements in a gating task with…

What makes a discourse coherent? One potential factor has been discussed in the linguistic literature in terms of a Question under Discussion (QUD). This approach claims that discourse proceeds by continually raising explicit or implicit questions, viewed as sets of alternatives, or competing descriptions of the world. If the interlocutor accepts…

Analysis of two- to five-year-olds' (N=26) responses to queries regarding utterances they made during free play indicated that social context interacted with response type, demonstrating that the initial utterance had a role in response determination and was important to the contingent query sequence. (Author/CB)

It is shown that, although native English speakers routinely use subject-verb-object questions for specific functions and in informal discourse, this question form rarely appears in textbooks or presentations used in English-as-a-Second-Language classrooms. Thus, language presented in these classes may not expose students to the complete range of…

Summarized in terms of competence and performance models is the development of questionning behavior in the language repertoire of retarded children. The role of questions, particularly WH questions, is reviewed in adult language (semantics and pragmatics) and children's language (receptive and expressive abilities). Discussed is research dealing…

Acquisition of answering systems based on speaker intention v literal components of questions was investigated in monolingual and bilingual English- and Japanese-speaking children. The results suggested that the English system is acquired earlier than the Japanese system and that the two systems interact in bilingual children. (Author/RD)

In a French study based on Spanish research, the communicative effectiveness and grammatical accuracy of foreign language students in generating appropriate classroom questions was investigated. Despite language differences, similarities were found in communication errors, especially incorrect interrogative words and structures, verb tenses and…

Investigated the effects of question tense (past, present, future, and conditional) on intentionally deceptive and truthful responses to questions asked during employment interviews. Identified, through computer analysis, six variables which differentiated between truthful and deceptive messages and 19 variables which identified between the four…

A study examined interactional patterns in interviews that characterize elicitation of one text type, description, including type/mixture of questions asked by the fieldworker and the speaker's response. Subjects (n=137) were of three ethnic groups and three socioeconomic levels. Results suggest questioning strategy can have strong, predictable…

Discusses an approach to analyzing teacher talk in second-language classrooms that assumes communicative classrooms are characterized by teacher talk reflecting external communication patterns. Argues that this analysis is over-simplistic, ignoring the reality of the classroom context and the features that make for effective communication within…

This multiple case study investigated the relationship between kindergarten teachers' questions and children's responses. The classroom discussions of 4 groups of children and their teachers (all middle income level) were taped and classified into five different question and response categories. Results indicated that: (1) some teachers ask more…

Examination of the transition to purposive use of intonation with single words for two infants revealed that both clearly used rising tones to ask questions by 1.5 years of age and demonstrated widespread and gradual grammatical use of intonation. (Author/CB)

Sentences evoked from three- to five-year-olds (N=16), analyzed for errors (particularly copying-without-deletion), showed errors when: the subject noun phrase (NP) contained a relative clause, the relative clause had an object gap, and the relative clause was long. (Author/CB)