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Part of
Three Streams of Generative Language Acquisition Research: Selected papers from the 7th Meeting of Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition – North America, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Edited by Tania Ionin and Matthew Rispoli
[Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 63] 2019
► pp. 85–105

Parsing, pragmatics, and representation

Children’s comprehension of two-clause questions

| Smith College
| Smith College
| Smith College

How do young children comprehend wh-questions from two-clause sentences? Is it via parsing heuristics like first resort, or different grammars, or the question-under-discussion? Fifty preschool children and twenty-three adults gave answers to nine adjunct wh-questions from sentences with false complements. The effects of verb and wh-question were tested on the type of answer children give: short distance, long distance, and reality answers, which link the wh only to the embedded verb. Neither children nor adults preferred to fill the first gap, but adults and children differed in the likelihood of a reality answer. This answer type was linked to children’s language skill assessed by another index. The disparities in various theoretical positions and research findings are then discussed. Differences in the form of the sentences used across the laboratories point to a new explanation for the disparity between the different results.

Keywords: Wh-questions, long-distance-movement, parsing, first-resort, comprehension
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Acquisition of Long Distance (LD) Wh-movement
    • 1.2Weak islands
      • 1.2.1Negation
      • 1.2.2Adverbs
    • 1.3Parsing
      • 1.3.1Parsing results
    • 1.4New study: False complements with adjunct questions
  • 2.Design
    • 2.1Nine scenarios
    • 2.2Example
  • 3.Method
    • 3.1Participants
    • 3.2Procedure
  • 4.Results
  • 5.Discussion
    • 5.1Experiment goals
    • 5.2Parsing, pragmatics and grammars
    • 5.3A second difference across studies
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Published online: 15 April 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lald.63.05vil
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