Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Languages differ in how they form questions that are equivalent to English questions such as who does John think Maria loves? in that the correct answer is who John thinks Maria loves, and not who Maria actually loves. Linguists disagree about how Polish makes such inquiries, and to date, no research has investigated how native Polish-speaking adults judge, process or produce these inquiries. In this paper, we investigated the nature of Polish questions via a corpus study, a grammaticality judgment study, and a spoken production study. Taken together, the results of these studies suggest that Polish has several syntactically distinct options for making these sorts of inquiries. Although, at first blush, this seems inconsistent with linguistic theories that argue against syntactic optionality, closer examination reveals that discourse context strongly affects which option is preferred. These findings highlight the importance of considering context, and the pitfall of studying sentences presented in isolation when evaluating linguistic or psycholinguistic claims.