Prosody and Dialogue Act: A Perceptual Study on Chinese Interrogatives

Prosody conveys dialogue acts and intentions in speech interaction. This study aims at investigating the interplay between prosody and dialogue acts (pragmatic functions) for Chinese dialogues. To this end, a perceptual experiment was carried out on interrogative intonations with varied prosodic features and contexts associated with 3 dialogue acts including request for affirmation, backchannel, and elaboration. The results demonstrated that (1) the dialogue acts of the context affects the perception of the interrogatives with the same prosodic features; (2) when there is a mismatch between the actual prosody and the context, the context limits or reduces the perception gradient of interrogatives; (3) the perception of interrogative information mainly depends on prosody, while context make contributions to the perception of interrogative-declarative information by modulating listeners’ interpretation of dialogue acts performed by certain prosodic features.