Some Stages in the Acquisition of Questions by Monolingual Children

Abstract

This article summarizes data on the acquisition of questions from German, English, Latvian, Swedish, and other languages. More specifically, it deals with the production of questions by children. The aim behind this survey is to prepare the ground for developing a theory on the acquisition of questions by children in such a way that the developmental sequence can be predicted for any natural language. Of course, in the present state of affairs, researchers are still far from this goal. Therefore, though I shall present the outlines of a theory on the acquisition of questions, this survey constitutes an overview which seeks to establish, and to make amenable to future detailed investigations, those major issues which a full theory would ultimately have to account for with much more precision than is now possible.

The major issues are the developmental sequences (1) for the various formal questions (i.e., intonation questions vs. segmentally marked questions vs. word order questions), (2) for the interrogative syntax (e.g., inversion, word order of interrogative markers, etc.), and (3) for the various segmental interrogative markers: pronoun or other (e.g., locative vs. instrumental vs. temporal, etc.). I shall tentatively propose a developmental sequence for all three types.

Whereas many researchers these days prefer to look at child-language acquisition from the point of view of cognitive development, the evidence summarized in this article leads me to emphasize the role of the formal properties of the linguistic devices used in natural languages. It is these formal properties which, more than anything else, seem to determine the developmental sequence characteristic of a given language. Some such formal properties are: free versus bound form, position, suprasegmental versus segmental, and generality of rules and items.