The Acquisition of "Wh"-Questions: Beyond Structural Economy and Input Frequency

Autor/inn/en	Nguyen, An D.; Legendre, Geraldine
Titel	The Acquisition of "Wh"-Questions: Beyond Structural Economy and Input Frequency
Quelle	In: Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 29 (2022) 1, S.79-104 (26 Seiten)Infoseite zur Zeitschrift PDF als Volltext Verfügbarkeit
Zusatzinformation	ORCID (Nguyen, An D.)
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	gedruckt; online; Zeitschriftenaufsatz
ISSN	1048-9223
DOI	10.1080/10489223.2021.1968867
Schlagwörter	Linguistic Input; Language Acquisition; Questioning Techniques; Preschool Children; French; Computational Linguistics; Information Seeking; Parent Child Relationship; Databases; English; Contrastive Linguistics; Task Analysis; Language Processing; Syntax; Linguistic Theory; Structural Analysis (Linguistics); Speech Communication + Suchen Sie Ihr Suchwort? Sprachbildung; Sprachaneignung; Spracherwerb; Befragungstechnik; Fragetechnik; Pre-school age; Preschool age; Child; Children; Pre-school education; Preschool education; Vorschulalter; Kind; Kinder; Vorschulkind; Vorschulkinder; Vorschulerziehung; Vorschule; Französisch; Linguistics; Computerlinguistik; Informationserschließung; Parents-child relationship; Parent-child-relation; Parent-child relationship; Eltern-Kind-Beziehung; Datenbank; English language; Englisch; Kontrastive Linguistik; Aufgabenanalyse; Sprachverarbeitung; Linguistische Theorie; Structural analysis; Strukturanalyse
Abstract	We present in this article corpus analyses, two experiments, and a preliminary English-French comparison on children's acquisition of "wh"-in-situ. Our examination of 10,000 "wh"-questions from CHILDES reveals that the reported empirical picture of "wh"-question acquisition in English is incomplete: A type of "wh"-in-situ, probe questions (PQs), has been left out from most discussions despite its presence in child-directed speech. Unlike "wh"-in-situ echo questions (EQs), PQs are used to request new information, and parents frequently use PQs and fronted information-seeking questions in alternation. The fact that PQs share the pragmatic space with fronted "wh"-questions while involving fewer syntactic operations and exhibiting lower input frequency allows us to test both structure-based and frequency-based theories of syntax acquisition. Our comprehension task with 3;06-5;06-year-olds confirms that children accept and understand PQs as information seeking. On the other hand, results from a production task show a strong avoidance of "wh"-in-situ, which is in line with reported elicited data from French-speaking children. We reason that a structural economy-based approach alone is not sufficient to account for children's disfavor of "wh"-in-situ. Depending on the input frequency and consistency, as well as the number of variants licensed by the grammar of a given language, children may treat part of the input as uninformative and initially only learn from higher-frequent, more regularized input. Their intake is thus selective. (As Provided).
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Erfasst von	ERIC (Education Resources Information Center), Washington, DC
Update	2024/1/01