The Acquisition of Questions and Its Relation to Cognitive Development in Normal and Linguistically Deviant Children: A Pilot Study

Abstract

Spontaneous questions from ten normal and ten deviant children were compared to see if there were any differences between the two groups. It was hypothesized that, if deviant children suffer from syntactic rather than cognitive deficits, they would use more cognitively advanced questions (e.g., now and when) since they were all considerably older than the normal group. The results, however, showed similar usage for both groups and were taken as an indication that linguistic deviance may be the result of a deficit in forming the cognitive precursors to language.