1,435
Views
2
CrossRef citations to date
0
Altmetric
Articles

The acquisition of wh-questions: Beyond structural economy and input frequency

ORCID Icon &
Pages 79-104 | Received 30 Jul 2020, Accepted 06 Aug 2021, Published online: 28 Sep 2021

References

  • Adli, Aria. 2004. Y a-t-il des morphèmes intonatifs impliqués dans la syntaxe interrogative du Français? Le cas du qu-in-situ. In T. Meisenburg & M. Selig (eds.), Nouveaux départs en phonologie: les conceptions sub- et suprasegmentales, 199–215. Tübingen: Narr.
  • Adli, Aria. 2006. French wh-in-situ questions and syntactic optionality: Evidence from three data types. Zeitschrift für Spachwissenschaft 25. 163–203.
  • Authier, Marc. 1993. Nonquantificational wh and weakest crossover. Linguistic Inquiry 24. 161–168.
  • Banfield, Ann. 1982. Unspeakable sentences: Narration and representation in the language of fiction. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
  • Bates, Douglas, Martin Maechler, Ben Bolker & Steve Walker. 2015. Fitting linear mixed-effects models using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software 67(1). 1–48.
  • Becker, Misha & Megan Gotowski. 2015. Explaining children’s wh-in situ questions: Against economy. In Elizabeth Grillo & Kyle Jepson (eds.), Proceedings of the 39th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development [BUCLD 39], 127–137. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
  • Bellugi, Ursula. 1965. The development of interrogative structures in children’s speech. In K. Riegel (ed.), The development of language function, 103–137. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
  • Blakemore, Diane. 1994. Echo questions: A pragmatic account. Lingua 94. 197–211.
  • Boersma, Paul & David Weenink. 2019. Praat: Doing phonetics by computer [Computer program]. Version 6.0.52. http://www.praat.org/.
  • Boucher, Paul. 2010. Wh-questions in French and English: Mapping syntax to information structure. In C. Breul & E. Göbbel (eds.), Comparative and contrastive studies of information structure, 101–137. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
  • Braunwald, Susan. 1985. The development of connectives. The Journal of Pragmatics 9(4). 513–525.
  • Brown, Roger. 1973. A first language: The early stages. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
  • Chang, Lisa. 1997. Wh-in-situ phenomena in French. Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia master’s thesis.
  • Cheng, Lisa Lai-Shen & Johan Rooryck. 2000. Licensing wh-in-situ. Syntax 3. 1–19.
  • Chomsky, Noam. 1993. A minimalist program for linguistic theory. In Kenneth L. Hale & S. Jay Keyser (eds.), The view from Building 20: Essays in linguistics in honor of Sylvain Bromberger, 1–52. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Chomsky, Noam. 1995. The minimalist program. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
  • Clark, Eve. 1978. Awareness of language: Some evidence from what children say and do. In R. J. A. Sinclair & W. Levelt (eds.), The child’s conception of language, 17–43. Berlin: Springer Verlag.
  • Comyn, Marie. 2013. Wh-in situ is accompanied by which formal features? Ghent, Belgium: Ghent University master’s thesis.
  • Coveney, Aidan. 2002. Variability in spoken French: A sociolinguistic study of interrogation and negation. Bristol/Portland: Elm Bank. Reprint from 1996 original.
  • Crain, Stephen & Mineharu Nakayama. 1987. Structure dependence in grammar formation. Language 63(3). 522–543.
  • Crisma, Paola. 1992. On the acquisition of wh-questions in French. Geneva Generative Papers 1. 115–122.
  • Cronel-Ohayon, Stephany. 2004. Etude longitudinal d’une population d’enfants dysphasiques. Geneva, Switzerland: University of Geneva dissertation.
  • Culbertson, Jennifer. 2010. Convergent evidence for categorial change in French: From subject clitic to agreement marker. Language 86(1). 85–132.
  • Cuza, Alejandro, Lauren Miller, Rocio Tattam & Mariluz Vergara. 2019. Structure complexity effects in child heritage Spanish: The case of the Spanish personal a. International Journal of Bilingualism 23(6). 1333–1357.
  • de Villiers, Jill (see Villiers)
  • Demetras, Martha. 1989. Working parents’ conversational responses to their two-year-old sons. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona dissertation.
  • Demuth, Katherine, Jennifer Culbertson & Jennifer Alter. 2006. Word-minimality, epenthesis, and coda licensing in the acquisition of English. Language & Speech 49. 137–174.
  • Déprez, Viviane, Kristen Syrett & Shigeto Kawahara. 2013. The interaction of syntax, prosody, and discourse in licensing French wh-in-situ questions. Lingua 124. 4–19.
  • Dickinson, David & Patton Tabors. 2001. Beginning literacy with language: Young children learning at home and school. Baltimore: Paul Brookes Publishing.
  • Durrleman, Stephanie, Theodoros Marinis & Julie Franck. 2016. Syntactic complexity in the comprehension of wh-questions and relative clauses in typical language development and autism. Applied Psycholinguistics 37(6). 1501–1527.
  • Friedmann, Naama, Adriana Belletti & Luigi Rizzi. 2009. Relativized relatives: Types of intervention in the acquisition of A-bar dependencies. Lingua 119(1). 67–88.
  • Gagliardi, Annie & Jeffrey Lidz. 2014. Statistical insensitivity in the acquisition of Tsez noun classes. Language 90(1). 58–89.
  • Gass, Susan. 1997. Input, interaction, and the second language learner. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
  • Goodwin, Anthony, Deborah Fein & Letitia Naigles. 2015. The role of maternal input in the development of wh-question comprehension in autism and typical development. Journal of Child Language 42(1). 32–63.
  • Gotowski, Megan. 2017. Wh-in situ production in child French. Linguistica Atlantica 36(2). 99–109.
  • Grice, Paul. 1975. Logic and conversation. In Peter Cole & Jerry Morgan (eds.), Syntax and semantics, vol. 3, Speech acts, 41–58. New York: Academic Press.
  • Gualmini, Andrea, Sarah Hulsey, Valentine Hacquard & Danny Fox. 2008. The question-answer requirement for scope assignment. Natural Language Semantics 16(3). 205–237.
  • Hamann, Cornelia. 2006. Speculations about early syntax: The production of wh-questions by normally developing French children and French children with SLI. Catalan Journal of Linguistics 5(1). 143–189.
  • Hendriks, Petra & Charlotte Koster. 2010. Production/comprehension asymmetries in language acquisition. Lingua 120(8). 1887–1897.
  • Hopp, Holger, Michael T. Putnam & Nora Vosburg. 2019. Derivational complexity vs. transfer effects: Long-distance wh-movement in heritage and L2 grammars. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 9(3). 341–375.
  • Hout, Angeliek van, Alma Veenstra & Sanne Berends. 2011. All pronouns are not acquired equally in Dutch: Elicitation of object and quantitative pronouns. In Proceedings of the 4th Conference on Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition North America [GALANA 2010], 106–121. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.
  • Hudson Kam, Carla & Elissa Newport. 2005. Regularizing unpredictable variation: The roles of adult and child learners in language formation and change. Language Learning and Development 1. 151–195.
  • Hudson Kam, Carla & Elissa Newport. 2009. Getting it right by getting it wrong: When learners change languages. Cognitive Psychology 59(1). 30–66.
  • Humphreys, Gina. 2012. Linking sentence production and comprehension: The neural mechanisms underlying production and comprehension control processes. York, UK: University of York dissertation.
  • Hupp, Julie & Melissa Jungers. 2013. Beyond words: Comprehension and production of pragmatic prosody in adults and children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 115(3). 536–551.
  • Ito, Kiwako, Nobuyuki Jincho, Utako Minai, Naoto Yamane & Reiko Mazuka. 2012. Intonation facilitates contrast resolution: Evidence from Japanese adults and 6-year-olds. Journal of Memory and Language 66. 265–284.
  • Jakubowicz, Celia. 2005. The language faculty: (Ab)normal development and interface constraints. Paper presented at GALA 2005, September 8–10, Siena, Italy.
  • Jakubowicz, Celia. 2011. Measuring derivational complexity: New evidence from typically developing and SLI learners of L1 French. Lingua 121(3). 339–351.
  • Jakubowicz, Celia & Nelleke Strik. 2008. Scope-marking strategies in the acquisition of long distance wh-questions in French and Dutch. Language and Speech 51(1–2). 101–132.
  • Kuczaj, Stan. 1977. The acquisition of regular and irregular past tense forms. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 16. 589–600.
  • Lambrecht, Knud. 1994. Information structure and sentence form. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Lambrecht, Knud. 2000. When subjects behave like objects: A markedness analysis of sentence focus constructions across languages. Studies in Language 24. 611–82.
  • Larrivée, Pierre. 2019. Historical pragmatics, explicit activation, and wh-in-situ in French. In I. Feldhausen, M. Elsig, I. Kuchenbrandt & M. Neuhaus (eds.), Romance languages and linguistic theory 15: Selected papers from “Going Romance” 30, Frankfurt, 113–133. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
  • MacWhinney, Brian. 2000. The CHILDES Project: Tools for analyzing talk, 3rd edn. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
  • Mathieu, Eric. 2004. The mapping of form and interpretation: The case of optional wh-movement in French. Lingua 114. 1090–1132.
  • McAuliffe, Michael, Michaela Socolof, Sarah Mihuc, Michael Wagner, and Morgan Sonderegger. 2017. Montreal Forced Aligner [Computer program]. Version 0.9.0. http://montrealcorpustools.github.io/Montreal-Forced-Aligner/
  • Myers, Lindsy. 2007. Wh-interrogatives in spoken French: A corpus-based analysis of their form and function. Austin, TX: University of Texas at Austin dissertation.
  • Omaki, Akira & Jeffrey Lidz. 2015. Linking parser development to acquisition of syntactic knowledge. Language Acquisition 22(2). 158–192.
  • Palasis, Katerina. 2009. Syntaxe générative et acquisition: le sujet dans le développement du système linguistique du jeune enfant. Nice, France: University of Nice Sophia Antipolis dissertation.
  • Palasis, Katerina, Richard Faure & Frédéric Lavigne. 2019. Explaining variation in wh-position in child French: A statistical analysis of new semi-naturalistic data. Language Acquisition 26(2). 210–234.
  • Papafragou, Anna, Kimberly Cassidy & Lila Gleitman. 2007. When we think about thinking: The acquisition of belief verbs. Cognition 105(1). 125–165.
  • Park-Johnson, Sunny. 2017. Cross-linguistic influence of wh-in-situ questions by Korean-English bilingual children. International Journal of Bilingualism 21(4). 419–432.
  • Perfors, Amy. 2012. When do memory limitations lead to regularization? An experimental and computational investigation. Journal of Memory and Language 67(4). 486–506.
  • Perfors, Amy, Joshua Tenenbaum & Terry Regier. 2011. The learnability of abstract syntactic principles. Cognition 118(3). 306–338.
  • Perkins, Lauren, Naomi Feldman & Jeffrey Lidz. 2017. Learning an input filter for argument structure acquisition. In Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics, 11–19. Valencia, Spain: Association for Computational Linguistics.
  • Plunkett, Bernadette. 2002. Null subjects in child French interrogatives: A view from the York corpus. Romance corpus linguistics: Corpora and spoken language, 441–452. Tübingen, Germany: Narr.
  • Pozzan, Lucia & Virginia Valian. 2016. Asking questions in child English: Evidence for early abstract representations. Language Acquisition 24(3). 209–233.
  • Prévost, Philippe, Laurice Tuller, Marie Barthez, Joelle Malvy & Frédérique Bonnet-Brilhault. 2017. Production and comprehension of French wh-questions by children with ASD. Applied Psycholinguistics 38(5). 1095–1131.
  • Prévost, Philippe, Nelleke Strik & Laurie Tuller. 2014. Wh-questions in child L2 French: Derivational complexity and its interactions with L1 properties, length of exposure, age of exposure, and the input. Second Language Research 30(2). 225–250.
  • Reis, Marga. 2012. On the analysis of echo questions. Tampa Papers in Linguistics 3.1–24.
  • Roeper, Thomas & Jill de Villiers. 2011. The acquisition path for wh-questions. Handbook of Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition. Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, vol. 41, 189–246. Dordrecht: Springer.
  • Sachs, Jacqueline. 1983. Talking about the there and then: The emergence of displaced reference in parent–child discourse. In K. E. Nelson (ed.), Children’s language, vol. 4, 1–28. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
  • Schneider, Jordan, Lauren Perkins & Naomi Feldman. 2019. A noisy channel model for systematizing unpredictable input variation. In Megan M. Brown & Alexandra Kohut (eds.), Proceedings of the 44th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development [BUCLD 44], 533–547. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
  • Schwab, Jessica, Casey Lew-Williams & Adele Goldberg. 2018. When regularization gets it wrong: Children over-simplify language input only in production. Journal of Child Language 45(5). 1054–1072.
  • Seidl, Amanda, George Hollich & Peter Jusczyk. 2003. Early understanding of subject and object wh-questions. Infancy 4(3). 423–436.
  • Sekerina, Irina & John Trueswell. 2012. Interactive processing of contrastive expressions by Russian children. First Language 32(1–2). 63–87.
  • Sharwood Smith, Michael. 1986. Comprehension versus acquisition: Two ways of processing input. Applied Linguistics 7. 239–256.
  • Shlonsky, Ur. 2012. Notes on wh in situ in French. In L. Brugé, A. Cardinaletti, G. Giusti, N. Munaro & C. Poletto (eds.), Functional heads, 242–252. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Singleton, Jenny & Elissa Newport. 2004. When learners surpass their models: The acquisition of American Sign Language from inconsistent input. Cognitive Psychology 49(4). 370–407.
  • Snedeker, Jesse. 2008. Effects of prosodic and lexical constraints on parsing in young children (and adults). Journal of Memory and Language 58(2). 574–608.
  • Strik, Nelleke & Ana Pérez-Leroux. 2011. Jij doe wat girafe?: Wh-movement and inversion in Dutch-French bilingual children. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 1(2). 175–205.
  • Strik, Nelleke. 2007. L’acquisition des phrases interrogatives chez les enfants francophones. Psychologie française 52(1). 27–39.
  • Strik, Nelleke. 2008. Syntaxe et acquisition des phrases interrogatives en français et en néerlandais: une étude contrastive. University Paris 8, doctoral thesis.
  • Takahashi, Mari. 1991. The acquisition of echo questions. In Thomas Maxfield & Bernadette Plunkett (eds.), Papers on the acquisition of wh: Proceedings of the UMass Roundtable 1990, 213–223. Amherst, MA: GLSA.
  • Valian, Virginia & Lyman Casey. 2003. Young children’s acquisition of wh-questions: The role of structured input. Journal of Child Language 30. 117–143.
  • van Hout, Angeliek (see Hout)
  • Van Houten, Lori. 1986. Role of maternal input in the acquisition process: The communicative strategies of adolescent and older mothers with their language learning children. Paper presented at the Boston University Conference on Language Development, October 17–19, Boston.
  • Vieira, Clariana & Elaine Grolla. 2020. The pragmatics of wh-in-situ questions in Brazilian Portuguese: Data from child and adult language. In Megan M. Brown & Alexandra Kohut (eds.), Proceedings of the 44th Boston University Conference on Language Development [BUCLD 44], 677–690. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
  • Villiers, Jill de. 1995. Questioning minds and answering machines. In D. MacLaughlin & S. McEwen (eds.), Proceedings of the 19th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development [BUCLD] 19, 20–36. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
  • Villiers, Jill de & Jennie Pyers. 2002. Complements to cognition: A longitudinal study of the relationship between complex syntax and false-belief-understanding. Cognitive Development 17(1). 1037–1060.
  • Weist, Richard & Andrea Zevenbergen. 2008. Autobiographical memory and past time reference. Language Learning and Development 4(4). 291–308.
  • Yang, Charles. 2002. Knowledge and learning in natural language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Yang, Charles. 2016. The price of productivity. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
  • Yip, Virginia & Stephen Matthews. 2000. Syntactic transfer in a Cantonese–English bilingual child. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 3(3). 193–208.
  • Yip, Virginia & Stephen Matthews. 2007. The bilingual child: Early development and language contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Yuan, Boping. 2015. The effect of computational complexity on L1 transfer: Evidence from L2 Chinese attitude-bearing wh-questions. Lingua 167. 1–18.
  • Zuckerman, Shalom & Aafke Hulk. 2001. Acquiring optionality in French wh-questions: An experimental study. Revue Québéquoise de Linguistique 30. 71–97.

Reprints and Corporate Permissions

Please note: Selecting permissions does not provide access to the full text of the article, please see our help page How do I view content?

To request a reprint or corporate permissions for this article, please click on the relevant link below:

Academic Permissions

Please note: Selecting permissions does not provide access to the full text of the article, please see our help page How do I view content?

Obtain permissions instantly via Rightslink by clicking on the button below:

If you are unable to obtain permissions via Rightslink, please complete and submit this Permissions form. For more information, please visit our Permissions help page.