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When a nod is as good as a word: Form-function relationships between questions and their responses

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

D. V. M. Bishop ,
J. Chan ,
J. Hartley  and
F. Weir
D. V. M. Bishop*
Affiliation:
MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge
J. Chan
Affiliation:
University of Manchester
J. Hartley
Affiliation:
University of Sheffield
F. Weir
Affiliation:
University of Manchester
*
Department of Experimental Psychology, South Parks Road, Oxford 0X1 3UD, United Kingdom. Email: dorothy.bishop@psy.ox.ac.uk
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Abstract

It is well established that syntactic form and communicative function do not always correspond: for instance, a syntactic question might function as a request for information (“did you see the play?”) or a request for acknowledgment when there is no doubt about polarity of the response (“there's a tower at Blackpool, isn't there”). Using data from a corpus of 18 child–adult conversations, we distinguished adult utterances that solicited information from those soliciting acknowledgment (i.e., where the response was predictable, and the utterance served a predominantly social function). Both types of utterance were usually responded to by children, but the form of response differed according to the communicative function of the utterance. Nonverbal and prosodic responses (e.g., nods or “mmh”) were significantly more likely to occur in response to utterances soliciting acknowledgment than in response to yes/no questions that solicited information. There were consistent form–function relationships for responses as well as for soliciting utterances. Nonverbal nods and headshakes were not functionally equivalent to verbal “yes” and “no.”

Type
Articles
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 19 , Issue 3 , July 1998 , pp. 415 - 432
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1998

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