Do Persian Native Speakers Prosodically Mark Wh-in-situ Questions?

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Phonetics
• Psycholinguistics

Background:

• Prosody plays a crucial role in differentiating sentence types, particularly in distinguishing declarative and interrogative utterances.
• In languages like Persian, wh-in-situ questions lack initial wh-phrases, necessitating alternative methods for marking interrogativity.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether prosody can distinguish Persian wh-in-situ questions from declarative sentences.
• To determine if prosodic features mark interrogativity in the absence of initial wh-phrases.

Main Methods:

• A production experiment was conducted with native Persian speakers.
• Participants were elicited to produce both wh-in-situ questions and declarative sentences.
• Acoustic analysis focused on prosodic features at local (pre- and post-wh) and global (entire sentence) levels.

Main Results:

• Prosodic features were found to significantly distinguish Persian wh-in-situ questions from declaratives.
• Specific prosodic correlates were identified in the pre-wh portion and the complete sentence, confirming the hypothesis.

Conclusions:

• Prosody serves as a key marker for interrogativity in Persian wh-in-situ questions.
• Findings support theoretical frameworks linking prosody to sentence type encoding, pragmatics, and the universal association between tension/interrogativity and relaxation/declarativity.