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…

Intended for parents of blind children, the booklet presents guidelines regarding potential difficulties in blind children's language development. The first section focuses on repetitions and offers suggestions on dealing with and responding to those repetitions. Section 2 considers reasons for blind children's questions, including attention,…

Paper presented at the Annual Conference of the Association of Teachers of Japanese held in November 1971 in Chicago, Illinois. (DS)

The need for students of English to learn the question pattern "What is X like?" is described, and techniques for teaching this pattern are discussed. (RM)

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)

THE EFFECT OF FREQUENTLY USED ORAL LANGUAGE PATTERNS IN WRITTEN MATERIAL ON THE READING COMPREHENSION OF FOURTH GRADERS WAS EXAMINED. RUDDELL'S FREQUENCY PATTERNS WERE USED. TWO PASSAGES WERE CONSTRUCTED -- THE FIRST WITH 4 HIGH FREQUENCY PATTERNS (PASSAGE A) AND THE SECOND WITH 4 LOW FREQUENCY PATTERNS (PASSAGE B). FACTORS WITHIN THE PASSAGES…

The need for mastery of question forms by the English language learner is discussed. A system of techniques for use with a group of intermediate young adult learners familiar with question patterns but lacking oral practice is suggested. (RM)

The early acquisition of the interrogative system, with data from Serbo-Croatian, is investigated. The subject is approached from the angle of adult-child interaction. A first-born pair of dizygotic twins were observed, beginning a month prior to the time when they first began to produce questions. (Author/RM)

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…

Analysis of the transcript of a social worker's interview with a five-and-a-half-year-old girl allegedly sexually abused by a man focuses on how the interview was conducted and elements that suggest it should not be used as testimony. First, inconsistencies in the transcript that cast doubt on the child's reliability are noted, and the truth of…