Developmental changes in misinterpretation of garden-path wh-questions in French

Abstract

This study explores (mis)interpretation of biclausal wh-questions by French-speaking adults and children, aiming to investigate cross-linguistic differences in sentence revision mechanisms. Following previous work in Japanese the ambiguity of wh-questions was manipulated: In ambiguous questions, the fronted wh-phrase could be associated with the first, main-clause verb or the second, embedded-clause verb, while in garden-path questions, an inserted filled-gap prepositional phrase (PP) blocked main-clause attachment. Importantly, French differs from Japanese in that the filled gap arises after the first verb—that is, after the wh-phrase has been interpreted within the main clause. Two story-based comprehension experiments were conducted to probe the effect of word order on revision performance. Adults and children frequently provided main-clause interpretations of ambiguous questions. In filled-gap questions, children displayed relatively acute sensitivity to the filled-gap in wh-argument questions (Experiment 2), but not in wh-adjunct questions (Experiment 1); adults showed surprisingly low sensitivity to it, frequently misinterpreting adjunct and argument questions. Acceptability ratings (Experiment 3) showed that adults systematically prefer in situ questions over wh-fronting questions. We conclude that timing of the error signal influences revision, and that whereas French-speaking children prioritize syntactic cues, adults prioritize distributional information about the optionality of wh-fronting in French.

Keywords:

• Wh-questions
• Garden-path
• Misinterpretation
• Filled-gap dependency
• Sentence revision

We wish to thank Patrick Sturt and Whit Tabor for useful discussions, and we are grateful to Aaron Apple for his editorial assistance.

Notes

¹The gloss abbreviations are as follows: Acc = accusative case marker, Comp = complementizer, Dim = diminutive marker, Gen = genitive case marker, Q = question particle, Top = topic marker.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swiss National Fund for Scientific Research [grant number 100014–126924 to Julie Franck].