Syntactic, semantic and pragmatic correlates of the acquisition of exhaustivity in Wh-questions: A study of Polish monolingual children

ABSTRACT

This study investigates relationships between acquisition of exhaustivity in single and multiple wh-questions, mastery of semantic and pragmatic aspects of quantifier comprehension, and general skills in receptive grammar. The participants of the study were 25 Polish monolingual typically developing children aged 4;02–6;02, who were administered a set of tasks including the Exhaustive Wh-Questions Task, the Test for Reception of Grammar, version 2, and the Comprehension of Quantification Task. The selection of the tasks was motivated by the major linguistic accounts of exhaustivity. We found significant predictive relationships between single exhaustive wh-questions and both semantics of quantifiers and receptive grammar. In contrast, the scores in multiple wh-questions were predicted only by age, showing their delayed acquisition with respect to single wh-questions. However, this age-related difference was not accounted for by any of the linguistic variables tested. Crucially, the analyses revealed no relationships between the mastery of pragmatics of quantification (involving scalar implicature) and exhaustivity in wh-questions, suggesting that the two are not driven by a common pragmatic mechanism.

Acknowledgments

The article is based on an MA study conducted by the first author of this article under the supervision of the second author and in cooperation with the other coauthors. Thanks to Magdalena Wojtecka, who created the pictures for the exhaustivity task. Special thanks to Tom Roeper, with whom various versions of the exhaustivity task were developed and who encouraged its cross-linguistic adaptation. We thank Joanna Rączaszek-Leonardi and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions on improving the previous versions of the article. We are also grateful to the children who participated in the study, the kindergarten staff, and researchers from the University of Warsaw and Jagiellonian University, who greatly assisted the completion of the project.

Funding

The study was realized under the auspices of COST action IS0804 Language Impairment in a Multilingual Society: Linguistic Patterns and the Road to Assessment and partially funded by the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education/National Science Center (Grant no. 809/N-COST/2010/0 awarded to the Faculty of Psychology, University of Warsaw in collaboration with the Institute of Psychology, Jagiellonian University). Cross-linguistic adaptations of the exhaustivity task have been supported by the COST Action IS0804, by COST Action A33 “Crosslinguistic Robust Stages of Children’s Linguistic Performance with Application to Language Assessment,” and by the project MILA at the Research Center IDEA (LOEWE program for excellency from the State of Hesse). The third author of the article was supported by a grant SG090676 from the British Academy and benefited from feedback from the ESRC’s XPrag-UK network (RES-810-21-0069).

Notes

¹ To what extent each of these linguistic domains influences the interpretation of wh-questions is a matter of controversy and will be addressed later in this article.

² Quantifier spreading is an error, in which children reject such statements as Every dog has a bone uttered in the context where all dogs have bones and there is one additional bone that is not possessed by any of the dogs.

³ However, the same study noted no significant differences between short subject and short object questions.

⁴ However, as reported by Pesetsky (2000), under particular discourse conditions (Discourse-linking), English syntax might also accept superiority violations.

⁵ 0/5 arrangement means that none of the five skirts shown in the picture is in the boxes. Accordingly, 5/5 arrangement indicates that all five items are in the boxes.

Additional information

Funding

The study was realized under the auspices of COST action IS0804 Language Impairment in a Multilingual Society: Linguistic Patterns and the Road to Assessment and partially funded by the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education/National Science Center (Grant no. 809/N-COST/2010/0 awarded to the Faculty of Psychology, University of Warsaw in collaboration with the Institute of Psychology, Jagiellonian University). Cross-linguistic adaptations of the exhaustivity task have been supported by the COST Action IS0804, by COST Action A33 “Crosslinguistic Robust Stages of Children’s Linguistic Performance with Application to Language Assessment,” and by the project MILA at the Research Center IDEA (LOEWE program for excellency from the State of Hesse). The third author of the article was supported by a grant SG090676 from the British Academy and benefited from feedback from the ESRC’s XPrag-UK network (RES-810-21-0069).