The contribution of context and contour to perceived belief in polar questions

Abstract

In the past decades, we have advanced significantly in our knowledge of intonational meaning, but few studies have tested experimentally the way in which discourse contexts affect intonational meaning. In this work we were specifically interested in how listeners use both intonation and discourse context to infer information about speaker belief states. We examined the effect of five bias types on two intonation contours used for polar questions (PQs) in Puerto Rican Spanish (PRS). The bias types consisted of unbiased, mild positive bias, strong positive bias and mismatch bias contexts. The intonation contours had been previously claimed to differ in the belief state information they convey – ¡H*L% is known to mark utterances as PQs without encoding specific belief state on the part of the speaker, while L*HL% is known to convey a state of disbelief on the part of the speaker (Armstrong, 2010). We hypothesized that the lack of belief and the presence of disbelief for these contours, respectively, would be perceived by listeners when these contours were heard in an unbiased context. We also predicted that listeners would rely on contextual bias more for the ¡H*L% contour than the L*HL% contour, and that the disbelief meaning would persist regardless of discourse context. Perceived belief scores were analyzed, and results show that different bias types affected perceived belief scores in different ways. Mild positive bias did not seem to affect perceived belief for the two contours, while strong positive bias and mismatch bias did. Since L*HL% conventionally conveys disbelief, a reversal effect was shown when it was heard in the strong belief context. Participants’ comments indicate that in such cases, an ironic interpretation of the contour is available. These results, in addition to the comments provided by participants, show that perceived belief will depend both on the type of contextual bias, as well as the type of information conveyed intonationally. This work provides more evidence for the dynamic relationship between specific context types and intonation contours that differ in terms of the amount and type of meaning they convey.