Bias in polar questions: Evidence from English and German production experiments

Different polar question forms (e.g., Do you / Do you not / Don’t you / Really? Do you... have a car?) are not equally appropriate in all situations. The present experiments investigate which combinations of original speaker belief and contextual evidence influence the choice of question type in English and German. Our results show that both kinds of bias interact: in both languages, positive polar questions are typically selected when there is no original speaker belief and positive or non-informative contextual evidence; low negation questions (Do you not...?) are most frequently chosen when no original belief meets negative contextual evidence; high negation questions (Don’t you...?) are prompted when positive original speaker belief is followed by negative or non-informative contextual evidence; positive questions with really are produced most frequently when a negative original bias is combined with positive contextual evidence. In string-identical forms, there are prosodic differences across crucial conditions.


Introduction
A polar question (PQ) is a question that expects only two possible answers: an affirmativeansweroranegativeone(Karttunen1977;Groenendijk&Stokhof1984; see also Krifka 2013;Roelofsen & Farkas 2015). However, even if we just want an affirmativeornegativeanswer,therearedifferentwaystophrasethequestion.Four possibilities are shown in examples (1)-(4), together with their linguistic classification.Forthefourthpossibility,twoalternativerealizationsaregiven,withtheadverb really and with focus on the finite verb, which have been treated in a parallel way (Romero&Han2004).

Participants
Forty-twoEnglishnativespeakers(between20and36years,M=25.0;SD=2.9;17 males,25females)participatedforasmallfeeorcoursecredit.Twofurtherparticipants were tested but they did not complete the experiment. All participants were from the participant pool of the Division of Psychology and Language Sciences -University College London(UK).Noneofthemwasawareofthegoaloftheexperiment.Informedconsent wasobtainedfromeveryparticipant.

Stimuli
Wecreated46writtenscenarios(oneusedaspracticetrial,30astargettrialsand15as filler trials). The scenarios presented ordinary fictional conversations (e.g., two friends preparing the dinner, two students looking for the library). Each story was composed of two caption/picture pairs, followed by the selection of the most appropriate polar question.
Participants were tested individually in a quiet laboratory at the Division of Psychology and Language Sciences -University College London (UK). The experiment startedwithwritteninstructionsinformingthemthattheywereexpectedtoreadthe twocaptionsattachedtothepictures,andtoselectthequestionthatsoundedmost naturalbyproducingitaloud.Then,anexamplewasgivenforeachphaseofatrial, followed by a practice trial. If none of the questions was considered appropriate, participantswereinstructedtoformulateadifferentquestionortosay"Otherways ofasking".

Question type Example Question
PosQ Is there a train in the early morning?
Really-PosQ Really?! Is there a train in the early morning?
LowNQ Is there no train in the early morning?

HiNQ
Isn't there a train in the early morning?
With respect to RQ1, both original bias and evidence bias affect the selection of PQ formsinGerman.