ERIC Number: EJ1328139
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2022
Pages: 26
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1048-9223
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Available Date: N/A
The Acquisition of "Wh"-Questions: Beyond Structural Economy and Input Frequency
Nguyen, An D.; Legendre, Geraldine
Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, v29 n1 p79-104 2022
We present in this article corpus analyses, two experiments, and a preliminary English-French comparison on children's acquisition of "wh"-in-situ. Our examination of 10,000 "wh"-questions from CHILDES reveals that the reported empirical picture of "wh"-question acquisition in English is incomplete: A type of "wh"-in-situ, probe questions (PQs), has been left out from most discussions despite its presence in child-directed speech. Unlike "wh"-in-situ echo questions (EQs), PQs are used to request new information, and parents frequently use PQs and fronted information-seeking questions in alternation. The fact that PQs share the pragmatic space with fronted "wh"-questions while involving fewer syntactic operations and exhibiting lower input frequency allows us to test both structure-based and frequency-based theories of syntax acquisition. Our comprehension task with 3;06-5;06-year-olds confirms that children accept and understand PQs as information seeking. On the other hand, results from a production task show a strong avoidance of "wh"-in-situ, which is in line with reported elicited data from French-speaking children. We reason that a structural economy-based approach alone is not sufficient to account for children's disfavor of "wh"-in-situ. Depending on the input frequency and consistency, as well as the number of variants licensed by the grammar of a given language, children may treat part of the input as uninformative and initially only learn from higher-frequent, more regularized input. Their intake is thus selective.
Descriptors: Linguistic Input, Language Acquisition, Questioning Techniques, Preschool Children, French, Computational Linguistics, Information Seeking, Parent Child Relationship, Databases, English, Contrastive Linguistics, Task Analysis, Language Processing, Syntax, Linguistic Theory, Structural Analysis (Linguistics), Speech Communication
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
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Language: English
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