QuBiSM investigates how prosody and gesture contribute to making and negotiating meaning in English and German biased questions, and how biased questions are acquired by children.

The most straightforward reason for asking a question is to gather information, as in "Do you have a bike?" However, questions can also request confirmation of a belief, as in "Don’t you have a bike?" The latter question is a so-called biased question because the speaker expresses a bias toward, i.e., is leaning toward, the possibility that the interlocutor owns a bike, while asking whether this is true. The meaning layers expressed by different biased questions have been the issue of intense research in the past two decades. Yet, their exact conditions of use in various communicative situations, the interplay of diverse linguistic cues signalling different types of biases, and the issue of how we acquire as children the intricate form-meaning relations of such multi-layered functionality are poorly understood. In the proposed project, we seek to fill this gap in order to arrive at a more nuanced account of biased questions. Biased questions are an ideal way to study how people negotiate complex layers of meaning through word order, intonation and gestures, which will further our understanding of communication in general.