Étude expérimentale de la perception de la modalité à travers l’intonation en anglais

In English, as in French, a question can be formed without changing the syntax of a sentence but simply by giving it an interrogative intonation. This study examines the perception of two intonation modalities, interrogative and declarative, in spoken sentences which included three levels of syntactic or lexical difficulty. The participants’ task was to discern the modality of each sentence, interrogative or declarative, and to react by means of a device which recorded their response times. There were three groups of participants: native English speakers, French students of English who had lived in an English-speaking country for a year and French students studying a subject other than English. Results reveal a significant group factor with native speakers responding more quickly than specialist students of English who responded quicker than the non-specialists. There was also an interaction between group and modality, whereby French speakers identified declaratives more quickly than interrogatives, but the opposite held for the native speakers. Regarding the type of sentence, response times were significantly slower for syntactically incomplete sentences