French interrogatives in context

French, like other languages, has different ways of asking the same question. While the meaning of the question might remain the same (for example: ‘what did you eat?’ compared to ‘what was it that you ate?’), the words and the order of the words used is different. In French, the context of the conversation changes which question forms are more or less likely to be used by native speakers of French (Donaldson 2016, Hamlaoui 2010, Pohl 1965, Ashby 1977, Söll 1983, Gadet 1997, Dewaele 2000, Coveney 2002). Studies have also shown that French speaking children learn to use certain question forms earlier in life, while others are learned a bit later (Strik 2007). The age at which these question forms are acquired is crucial, especially for certain speakers whose exposure to the French language drastically reduces at around the age of 6 years old (Fuchs 2019, Polinsky & Scontras 2019).

The current study focuses on this specific type of speaker (also known as a heritage speaker) and utilizes an experimental task called a Naturalness Judgment Task (NJT). This task uses both audio and visual cues to better understand the perceptions that heritage speakers have of different question forms across two different conversational contexts (formal vs informal), which are deterministic in the question choices that French speakers make when asking questions.