Questions are an important component of social communication. Autistic children experience difficulties in social communication, and question asking is a common target of services. We know little about how context shapes question asking in autistic children. The current study quantifies the frequency (rate per minute), form (wh-, yes/no, intonation), and function (information-seeking, directive, initiation/maintenance) of questions produced by autistic children (n = 15; mean age = 5.6 years) in two social contexts: a semi-structured activity (the "tablet task") and unstructured play (a naturalistic play session). Autistic children asked slightly more questions in the play session (M =1.35 questions/minute) than in the tablet task (M = 0.81 questions/minute), but there was no significant difference between conditions (effect size = 0.36). For question form, children asked wh-questions at similar rates across contexts, but they asked significantly more yes/no and intonation questions in the play session (effect sizes = 0.01, 0.62, 0.85, respectively). Finally, in function, children's use of information-seeking questions was similar across contexts, but they used significantly more directive and initiation/maintenance questions in the play session (effect sizes = 0.008, 0.82, 0.80, respectively). These findings offer important considerations for the assessment of question asking in autistic children.

ABSTRACT Unlike information-seeking questions (ISQs), rhetorical questions (RQs) do not ask for information but make a point. Behavioural data showed that this difference in illocution type is mainly signalled by intonation, with RQs requiring more specific tonal patterns than ISQs. This EEG study investigated the processing of tonally marked ISQs and RQs, when the illocution type was congruently or incongruently cued by a preceding mnemonic visual stimulus. We predicted a prosodic expectancy positivity (PEP) in incongruent vs. congruent conditions and earlier detection of incongruence in tonally marked ISQs. ERP results and an exploratory analysis of oscillatory brain activity showed congruency effects for tonally marked ISQs and RQs and different timing: PEP-like effects and alpha suppression occurred earlier in tonal ISQs than RQs. Beta-band suppression emerged at the utterance's end for both. The results show that tonally marked RQs require a more nuanced prosodic analysis of the entire utterance for interpretation.

Matrix questions in Sm’algyax (Tsimshianic; British Columbia, Alaska) are doubly marked. Wh-questions involve the fronting of a wh-expression to the clause-initial position, together with the interrogative clitic =u; polar questions are introduced by the complementizer ał—diachronically derived from negation—and additionally bear the clitic =ii. By contrast, embedded questions only exhibit a single component: wh-fronting for wh-questions and a complementizer element for polar questions. I argue that this asymmetry reflects a two-layer interrogative syntax. The polar complementizer and the null trigger for wh-movement instantiate an interrogative C[+Q] within CP, while the clitics =u and =ii instantiate an illocutionary operator SAASK within a higher Speech Act Phrase (SAP). Because SAP is restricted to main clauses, embedded questions necessarily lack interrogative clitics. This paper contributes novel empirical evidence from an underdescribed language to ongoing debates about the embeddability of speech acts. Sm’algyax shows clear evidence for an unembeddable SAP layer in the formation of canonical, information-seeking questions, supporting the view that SAP is a genuinely root-only projection (in line with Dayal 2023, pace Krifka 2014, 2023, Woods 2016).

This study analyzes questions related to phonology, lexis, and grammar that appear in Korean language teachers’ online communities, in order to examine how teachers’ language-related content knowledge is lacking in actual classroom contexts and how theyseek to supplement it. To this end, 100 questions dealing with Korean phonology, vocabulary, and grammar were collected from two major Korean language teacher communities hosted on a domestic portal site between 2023 and 2025. Each question was coded along three axes—the type of question(Q), the linguistic domain (C), and the function of the question (F)—and then examined in terms of its distribution and representative cases. The analysis shows that questions are highly concentrated in rule-confirming types (Q4)and form/meaning-contrast types (Q1, Q2), and that more than 80% of all questions fall into the grammar domain (C3), revealing a strongly grammar-centered questioning pattern. In terms of function, information-seeking questions (F1) account for about two-thirds of the data, and many questions nominally classified as knowledge-checking (F2) also serve, in practice, to seek new information about the existence, scope, exceptions, and explanatory principles of specific rules. A considerable number of questions concerning semantics and pragmatics are raised as issues of contrast between two grammatical forms or as problems of grammatical correctness, indicating that teachers tend to treat contextual factors such as discourse context and speaker stance within the grammar domain rather than as independent analytical categories. In addition, there are many cases in which teachers rely on the community even for questions that could be resolved by consulting resources such as the National Institute of Korean Language websites, grammar dictionaries, or textbooks, suggesting that their ability to diagnose the linguistic level at which a problem arises and to search for and interpret formal reference materials remains underdeveloped. These findings imply that Korean grammar instruction and teacher education should go beyond simply expanding theoretical grammar knowledge, and instead foster systematic awareness of linguistic levels including semantics and pragmatics, the ability to diagnose question types, and skills in using reference materials.

Abstract This article challenges the claim that exclamative sentences lack an illocutionary force of exclamation and are semantically equivalent to emotive assertions. Drawing on German data, we show that there are different classes of exclamatives that vary with respect to deniability and do not function well as answers to information-seeking questions but rather serve as replies in discourse. We argue that all the different classes need to be taken into account to arrive at appropriate generalizations for the phenomena under discussion.

Abstract In this paper we extend the discussion about reproducibility in corpus linguistics from quantitative to qualitative corpus-based approaches and argue that concerns about reproducibility can be addressed in interpretive research paradigms like corpus pragmatics. We first suggest that in interpretive research traditions, transparency is more important than reproducibility. We then argue that interpretive research can be made more transparent and accessible by using notebooks to share analytical procedures. We support these claims through a case study in which we analyse responses to information-seeking utterance-final or questions in spoken Australian English data. We use a qualitative, discourse analytic approach to systematically examine examples of these utterances from selected corpora. We show how corpus linguistic research can draw on existing infrastructures and tools for ensuring transparency, reproducibility, and replicability of interpretive analyses of the pragmatic functions of linguistic tokens in situated contexts.

The expression why not can be used as a fragment, functioning either as an anaphoric information-seeking question (e.g., Kim didn’t sleep well. Why not?) or a rhetorical question (e.g., Let’s do this. Sure, why not?). The central research questions for the uses of why not as an FQ (fragment question) concern what licenses the FQ, how we can obtain a sentential meaning from its nonsentential status, and what its syntactic structure is. Existing analyses postulate sentential sources for the FQ and apply deletion operations, as often adopted for other elliptical constructions. After a brief review of the why not FQ construction’s grammatical properties, the paper discusses challenging issues for the deletion-based sentential approaches. It then presents the results of a corpus investigation of the construction in the COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English) and sketches an alternative, direct interpretation approach in which the semantic resolution of the why not FQ construction is achieved by discourse machinery. This non-elliptical, discourse-based approach shows that once we have a system that represents structured discourse structures, we have straightforward mapping relations from the why not FQ construction to a proper propositional meaning.

Declarative questions (DQs) are declarative sentences used as questions. As declaratives, they differ from information-seeking polar questions (ISQs) in their syntax, and as biased questions, they differ from polar questions because they can convey various epistemic stances: a request for confirmation, surprise, or incredulity. Most studies on their intonation typically compare just one subtype to ISQs. In this paper, we present a production study where participants pronounced ISQs, confirmative and surprise DQs, and assertions in Russian. We analyzed the pitch and duration of the target utterances, as these prosodic cues proved to be important in the formal markedness of various biased question types across languages. A principal component analysis (PCA) on the pitch contours shows that DQs bear the same rise-fall contour as ISQs, but its peak falls on the stressed syllable of the last word of the sentence instead of the verb. The intonation of surprise DQs differs from that of confirmative ones in that they also exhibit a slight peak on the subject. Pitch alone is thus enough to distinguish the four utterance types tested. The PCA analysis was also used to identify higher-level trends in the data (principal components), two of which appear to correspond to core semantic properties, namely belief change and commitment. In addition to intonation, speaker commitment also correlates with utterance duration.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the teacher's question types that appear in the GED elementary science competency-based gifted education program and suggest implications for the development of data for gifted elementary science education. For this purpose, three experts used a tool that was modified the Textbook Question Strategy Assessment Instrument(TQSAI) to analyze the teacher's questions into question types according to the cognitive stage and questions that induce the inquiry process. Among the cognitive-level questions, the sum of the frequency of the low-level rhetorical and directly information-seeking questions accounted for 66.28%, while the frequency of the high-level focal, open-ended, and evaluative questions accounted for 33.71%. Since high-level questions promote students' thinking, determine direction, and facilitate communication, it is necessary to increase their frequency. Among the questions that induce the scientific inquiry process, including observation, communication, comparison, construction, experimentation, prediction, and application, the frequency of the lowest-level questions that induce observation accounted for 39.24%. Therefore, increasing the type of question at the high level will lead to a gifted education program that can increase the scientific competencies of learners such as scientific inquiry ability and creative problem solving ability.

Questions may be asked with an intent to acquire new information from the recipient (i.e., information-seeking questions) or with the intent to teach (i.e., pedagogical questions). Understanding how the questions' recipients infer the intent of questions is important, because the recipients' inferences have important consequences for reasoning and learning. In the present series of studies, we tested the hypothesis that i) askers use prosodic cues-an ever-present signal-to encode information-seeking and pedagogical intent both in deliberate and spontaneous speech and that ii) adults and children can draw appropriate inferences about the question's intent on the basis of prosody alone. In Experiments 1 and 2, we found that naïve adult listeners and children aged 5 years and above have the capacity to explicitly identify which asker has an intention to teach on the basis of prosody alone. In Experiment 3, we found that parents' spontaneous speech in pedagogical or information-seeking contexts is appropriately recognized by naïve listeners as pedagogical or information-seeking. Thus, the intent of pedagogical and information-seeking questions is acoustically encoded by askers, and it can be appropriately decoded by recipients.

Studies of young children's communication with adults and of their engagement in make-believe play have typically been conducted in parallel, with little dialogue between the two research programs. This review seeks to underline close connections between children's communication with adults and the emergence of the imagination, especially among 2- and 3-year-olds. Young children's ability to imagine currently uncertain possibilities shapes the information-seeking questions that they put to other people. Their ability to imagine as-yet unrealized but desirable possibilities shapes the requests that they make of other people. In each case, children appraise the responses that they receive. In the absence of answers that resolve their information-seeking questions, they repeat their questions. In the absence of compliance with their requests, they repeat their requests. By implication, from an early age, children seek information and help from other people with as-yet unknown or unrealized possibilities in mind.

This study investigates the turn-taking sequence, organisation of turns and the question patterns adopted during the examination of witnesses at the Oputa Panel sessions. The study employs purposive procedure in the selection of five questioning sessions as available on the YouTube. The data is transcribed and analysed using the linguistic approach of discourse analysis. In the findings, the counsel and the witness situate their talks firmly in the legal field with adherence to the turn-taking rules, explicit through yes/no responses, providing explanation to information seeking questions and also through the way the lawyers structure their questions to reveal narratives that shed light on the petition. The study notes that all activities and accomplishments at the Panel are carried out through the singular act of questioning. In order to prevent the language of conflict resolution procedures from seeming to alienate certain parties, particularly lay litigants, the study suggested the creation of a system for resolving disputes that is not closely tied to the usage of a particular linguistic form. Future efforts should focus on integrating additional language theories, such as psycholinguistics and critical discourse analysis.

Abstract The goal of the paper is to examine the use of the particle üldse ‘at all; ever; generally; absolutely (not)’ in questions in Estonian everyday face-to-face and telephone conversations. The analysis is based on the methodological framework of interactional linguistics. The particle üldse is found to serve three central functions in questions: (a) marking topic shifts and topic changes, (b) intensifying doubt or challenges, (c) emphasizing someone’s norm-violating behavior. Questions containing the particle üldse can be divided into two groups: neutral information-seeking questions and multifunctional questions that perform several social actions simultaneously. The particle üldse is commonly backward looking and serves both interpersonal and textual functions. Its use is often associated with non-preference, disagreement, or contradiction.

This study examined how mothers' question-asking behavior relates to their child's syntactic skills. One important aspect of maternal question-asking behavior is the use of complex questions when speaking with children. These questions can differ based on both their purpose and structure. The purpose may be to seek out information, to teach, or to get a simple yes/no response. Questions may even be rhetorical, with no answer intended at all. Structurally, questions can include a wh-word (who, what, when, where, why, and how) or not; however, these wh-questions are important because they elicit utterances from the child and support vocabulary development. Despite wh-questions eliciting a response from children, it remains unknown how these questions relate to children's syntactic skills. Thirty-four mother-child dyads participated in a 15-min seminaturalistic play session. Children were between the ages of 5 and 7 years (M = 6.26 years, SD = 1.04 years; 20 girls/14 boys). The Diagnostic Evaluation of Language Variation (DELV) assessment was used to measure syntactic skills in children. Using the Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts, questions were categorized based on structure (wh-questions vs. non-wh-questions) and purpose (information-seeking, pedagogical, or yes/no and rhetorical questions). A repeated-measures analysis of covariance and a linear regression model were implemented to address the frequency of different questions asked by mothers, as well as what types of questions are most related to children's concurrent syntactic skills. When controlling for total maternal utterances, results revealed that non-wh-questions and rhetorical/yes and no questions were the most frequent types of questions produced by mothers, in terms of structure and purpose, respectively. However, wh-questions were predominantly information-seeking questions. This is important, as the use of information-seeking wh-questions was positively associated with children's syntactic skills, as measured by the DELV, and resulted in children producing longer utterances in response to these questions, as determined by child mean length of utterance in words. Taken together, these findings suggest maternal use of wh-questions aids syntactic skills in children ages 5-7 years, likely because they require a more syntactically complex response on the child's behalf. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.27276891.

This study dynamically modeled the nuclear contours of L2 Spanish sentences produced by 16 Mandarin-speaking learners and 9 Spanish natives, using a speech corpus obtained from a discourse completion task. The target sentences included statements (broad focus, categorical, and corrective focus) and yes/no questions (information-seeking, confirmation-seeking, and tag questions). Our results indicate that Chinese students (a) could not produce correct nuclear configurations to differentiate between the categorical statement and corrective focus; (b) produced significantly higher pitch for nuclear pitch accent and lower pitch for unstressed syllables compared to Spanish natives; and (c) may have produced incorrect boundary tones influenced by the lexical stress positions of the nuclear word. The current study contributes empirical evidence to the theory of L2 prosodic learning and highlights the importance of fine-grained phonetic details beyond phonological (dis)similarities between learners’ L1 and L2. Furthermore, given the L2 prosody difficulties observed even among experienced L2 learners, proper prosodic training paradigms are needed in teaching practice. Keywords: Prosody; L2 Spanish; L1 Chinese speakers; Nuclear configuration; Second language

Limited guidance exists for analyzing participant engagement in provider-guided digital health interventions (DHIs). System usage is commonly assessed, with acknowledged limitations in measuring socio-affective and cognitive aspects of engagement. Nurse WRITE, an 8-week web-based nurse-guided DHI for managing symptoms among women with recurrent ovarian cancer, offers an opportunity to develop a framework for assessing multidimensional engagement. This study aims to develop a conceptual and analytic framework to measure socio-affective, cognitive, and behavioral engagement with provider-guided DHIs. We then illustrate the framework's ability to describe and categorize engagement using Nurse WRITE as an example. A sample of 68 participants from Nurse WRITE who posted on the message boards were included. We adapted a prior framework for conceptualizing and operationalizing engagement across 3 dimensions and finalized a set of 6 distinct measures. Using patients' posts, we created 2 socio-affective engagement measures-total count of socio-affective engagement classes (eg, sharing personal experience) and total word count-and 2 cognitive engagement measures-total count of cognitive engagement classes (eg, asking information-seeking questions) and average question completion percentage. Additionally, we devised behavioral engagement measures using website data-the total count of symptom care plans and plan reviews. k-Means clustering categorized the participants into distinct groups based on levels of engagement across 3 dimensions. Descriptive statistics and narratives were used to describe engagement in 3 dimensions. On average, participants displayed socio-affective engagement 34.7 times, writing 14,851 words. They showed cognitive engagement 19.4 times, with an average of 78.3% completion of nurses' inquiries. Participants also submitted an average of 1.6 symptom care plans and 0.7 plan reviews. Participants were clustered into high (n=13), moderate (n=17), and low engagers (n=38) based on the 6 measures. High engagers wrote a median of 36,956 (IQR 26,199-46,265) words. They demonstrated socio-affective engagement approximately 81 times and cognitive engagement around 46 times, approximately 6 times that of the low engagers and twice that of the moderate engagers. High engagers had a median of 91.7% (IQR 82.2%-93.7%) completion of the nurses' queries, whereas moderate engagers had 86.4% (IQR 80%-96.4%), and low engagers had 68.3% (IQR 60.1%-79.6%). High engagers completed a median of 3 symptom care plans and 2 reviews, while moderate engagers completed 2 plans and 1 review. Low engagers completed a median of 1 plan with no reviews. This study developed and reported an engagement framework to guide behavioral intervention scientists in understanding and analyzing participants' engagement with provider-guided DHIs. Significant variations in engagement levels across 3 dimensions highlight the importance of measuring engagement with provider-guided DHIs in socio-affective, cognitive, and behavioral dimensions. Future studies should validate the framework with other DHIs, explore the influence of patient and provider factors on engagement, and investigate how engagement influences intervention efficacy.

This is a conversation analysis study on courtroom communication. This study aims to investigate how the forces of question (information seeking and confirmation seeking) were achieved and the pragmatic strategies, particularly repetition, and reformulation, used by the prosecutor during a cross-examination of the defendant in an Indonesian murder case; a courtroom trial of a cyanide poisoning case considered weak due to a lack of sufficient evidence against the defendant. The data was obtained from the Kompas TV YouTube Channel and was transcribed using Jefferson’s (2004) technique of transcription. This study employed a descriptive qualitative method to discover the force of questions and pragmatic strategies. The data was analyzed by adapting Gibbons’ (2003) and Archer's (2005) classification of question form and question force. The results demonstrate both information-seeking and confirmation-seeking questions were used by the prosecutor. Gibbons’ (2003) repetition and reformulation strategies were used to further investigate the pragmatic strategies. The finding shows pragmatic strategies, particularly repetition, and reformulation, were also evidenced in the lines of questioning. The patterns of the findings indicate that the prosecutor attempted to portray the defendant’s unreliability and untrustworthiness in court. These findings also implicate that the existence of the strict rules of courtroom communication and power imbalance in court allows the prosecutor to influence the defendant’s response.

Abstract The final intonation in French wh-in-situ questions is subject to much debate. Although a wide variety of final pitch movements has been observed, recent studies generally agree on a tendency for final rises. In our study, we analysed the answered wh-in-situ questions (e.g. Tu veux savoir quoi ? – Tout ! ‘What do you want to know? – Everything!’) in a corpus of eleven audio books.For our analysis, we used perceptual classifications by three annotators. Annotations included not only the perception of final intonational movement (‘rise’/‘fall’/‘plateau’), but also string-related (wh-lexeme; ‘wh-word final’/‘wh-word non-final’) and pragmatic (‘information-seeking’/‘non-information-seeking’; ‘hierarchical’/‘non-hierarchical’) features.Our results show that a) even string-identical wh-in-situ questions can be pronounced with rises as well as falls and b) pragmatics affect the final pitch movement. If the speaker is hierarchically superior to the hearer, rises are less likely, and questions that are answered by the same speaker are even associated with a non-rising default. However, our data also suggest that pragmatic functions cannot be directly mapped to pitch movement. Information-seeking questions can be pronounced with all three final intonations and speakers may even choose opposite patterns for the same interrogative in the same context.

The current study used sequential analysis to examine dual-language learners’ (DLLs) questions and their relations to teacher responses in the context of small-group shared reading in preschool. Participants were 235 DLLs aged 3–5 years and 60 lead teachers from multiethnic preschool classrooms in Norway. Results showed that across four different books, children most often asked information-seeking questions (61–79%). Furthermore, children asked comprehension- and explanation-seeking questions more often than factseeking ones. Sequential analysis showed that the quality of teacher responses was highly dependent on the type of questions DLLs asked: preschool teachers consistently offered more extended and explanatory responses to DLLs’ comprehension- and explanation-seeking questions, compared to other types of questions. Our results suggest that in this way, children actively influence the extended talk they are exposed to during shared reading. Moreover, their questions offer possibilities for further back-and-forth exchanges about topics meaningful to DLLs.

abstract: This paper provides novel insights into the meaning of the particles li and dali used in matrix polar questions in Bulgarian. The primary data source is a corpus of an online chat by five family members created for the purposes of this paper. The main finding is that the two particles give rise to two different types of questions: matrix li questions are canonical, information seeking questions. Matrix dali questions, on the other hand, are non-canonical questions which we identify as non-intrusive questions in the sense of Farkas (2022) and analyze in the Table framework of Farkas & Bruce (2010).