Prosodic Cues in the Interpretation of Echo Questions in Chinese Spoken Dialogues

This study examines the effect of prosodic cues in the disambiguation of five discourse-pragmatic functions of echo questions and the corresponding statements in Chinese spoken dialogues. Data were collected in a “role-play” format to mimic different communicative functions of echo questions in real-life situations. Statistical analyses were performed on both global and local F0 variations associated with intonation patterns in echo questions and corresponding statements. Results showed that boundary tone features alone are not good predictors in distinguishing echo questions and statements; variations in intonation patterns are related to the different discourse-pragmatic functions that echo questions serve; echo questions and statements, as well as different discourse-pragmatic functions of echo questions, can be distinguished on the basis of global variations of prosodic features such as overall F0 slope and average F0, combined with local changes due to boundary tone features; and when information about morpho-syntactic structures and boundary tone features were included in the analysis, the accuracy of discriminant analysis was at 76.5%~94.1% for statements and echo questions, and at 57.6%~83.5% for different discourse-pragmatic functions. The accuracy dropped to 70.9% (2 groups) and 40.9% (6 groups) when morpho-syntactic structural information was not included, indicating that structural and contextual information contributed 30% and 60% respectively.