Chapter published in:
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
Published online: 15 April 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/lald.63.05vil
References

References

Abdulkarim, L.
(2001) Complex wh-questions and universal grammars: New evidence from the acquisition of negative barriers (Unpublished PhD dissertation). University of Massachusetts, Amherst.Google Scholar
Bishop, D. V. M., Nation, K., & Patterson, K.
(2014) When words fail us: Insights into language processing from developmental and acquired disorders. Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences, 369, 20120403.Google Scholar
Chomsky, N.
(1986) Barriers. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
(1995) The minimalist program. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
(2005) Three factors in language design. Linguistic inquiry, 36(1), 1–22. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Dayal, V.
(2000) Scope marking: Cross-linguistic variation in indirect dependency. In U. Lutz, G. Muller, & A. Von Stechow (Eds.), Wh-scope marking (Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 37) (pp.157–193). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
de Villiers, J. G.
(2001) Continuity and modularity in language acquisition and research. In L. Santelmann, M. Verrips, & F. Wijnen (Eds.), Annual Review of Language Acquisition (Vol. 3, pp.1–64). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(2010) On building up a sufficient representation for belief: Tense, Point of View and Wh-movement. In J. Costa, A. Castro, M. Lobo, & F. Pratas (Eds.), Language acquisition and development: Proceedings of Gala 2009 (pp.121–134). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.
(2015) Parsing and grammar: On filling in the gaps. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 5(4), 459–464. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
de Villiers, J. G., & de Villiers, P. A.
(2009) Complements enable representation of the contents of false belief: evolution of a theory of Theory of Mind. In S. Foster-Cohen (Ed.), Language acquisition (pp.169–195). Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
de Villiers, J.G., Kotfila, J. & Roeper, T.
(submitted) When is recursion easier for children? In Proceedings of GALA 17. Dordrecht: Springer. Google Scholar
de Villiers, J. G., & Pyers, J. E.
(2002) Complements to cognition: A longitudinal study of the relationship between complex syntax and false-belief-understanding. Cognitive Development, 17(1), 1037–1060. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
de Villiers, J. G., Roeper T., Harrington E., & Gadilauskas E.
(2012) Tense and truth in children’s question answering. In A. Biller, E. Chung, & A. Kimball (Eds.), Proceedings of the 36th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp.152–163). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
de Villiers, J. G., & Roeper. T.
(1995a) Barriers, binding and acquisition of the DP/NP distinction. Language Acquisition, 4, 73–104. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(1995b) Relative clauses are barriers to wh-Movement for young children. Journal of Child Language, 22, 389–404. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
de Villiers, J. G., Roeper, T., Bland-Stewart, L., & Pearson, B.
(2008) Answering hard questions: Wh-movement across dialects and disorder. Applied Psycholinguistics, 29, 67–103. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
de Villiers, J. G., Roeper, T., & Vainikka. A.
(1990) The acquisition of long-distance rules. In L. Frazier & J. G. de Villiers (Eds.), Language Processing and Language Acquisition (pp.257–297). Dordrecht: Springer. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Diessel, H., & Tomasello. M.
(2001) The acquisition of finite complement clauses in English: A corpus-based analysis. Cognitive Linguistics, 12, 97–141. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Fanselow, G.
(2005) Partial wh-movement. In M. Everaert & H. van Riemsdijk (Eds.), The Blackwell companion to syntax, Vol. 3. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Golinkoff, R, de Villiers, J., Hirsh-Pasek, K., Iglesias, A., & Wilson, M.
(2017) QUILS: Quick Interactive Language Screener. Baltimore, MD: Paul H. Brookes.Google Scholar
Goodluck, H., Foley, M., & Sedivy, J.
(1992) Adjunct islands and acquisition. In H. Goodluck & M. Rochemont (Eds.), Island constraints (pp.181–194). Dordrecht: Kluwer. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Harrigan, K., Hacquard, V., & Lidz, J.
(2016) Syntactic bootstrapping in the acquisition of attitude verbs: Think, want and hope. In K. Kim, P. Umbal, T. Block, Q. Chan, T. Cheng, K. Finney, M. Katz, S. Nickel-Thompson, & L. Shorten (Eds.), Proceedings of WCCFL 33 (pp.196–206). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Hyams, N.
(1986) Language acquisition and the theory of parameters. Dordrecht: Foris. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Lewis, S., Lidz, J., & Hacquard, V.
(2012) The semantics and pragmatics of belief reports in preschoolers. In A. Chereches (Ed.), Proceedings of SALT 22 (pp. 247 – 267). Linguistic Society of America. < https://​journals​.linguisticsociety​.org​/proceedings​/index​.php​/SALT​/issue​/view​/87> Google Scholar
McDaniel, D.
(1989) Partial and multiple wh-movement. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 7(4), 565–604. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
McDaniel, D. Chiu, B., & Maxfield, T.
(1995) Parameters for wh-movement types: Evidence from child language. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 13, 709–753. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Miyagawa, S.
(2005) EPP and semantically vacuous scrambling. In J. Sabel & M. Saito (Eds.), The free word order phenomenon: Its syntactic sources and diversity (pp.181–220). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Oiry, M., & Demirdache, H.
(2006) Evidence from L1 acquisition for the syntax of wh-scope marking in French. In V. Torrens & L. Escobar (Eds.), The acquisition of syntax in Romance languages (Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 41) (pp.289–315). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Omaki, A.
(2010) Commitment and flexibility in the developing parser (Unpublished PhD dissertation). University of Maryland.Google Scholar
Omaki, A., Davidson White, I., Goro, T., Lidz, J., & Phillips, C.
(2014) No fear of commitment: Children’s incremental interpretation in English and Japanese wh-questions. Language Learning and Development, 10(3), 206–233. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Philip, W., & de Villiers, J. G.
(1992) Monotonicity and the acquisition of weak islands. In E. Clark (Ed.), Proceedings of the twenty-fourth annual child language research forum (pp.99–111). Stanford, CA: CSLI.Google Scholar
Phillips, C., & Ehrenhofer, L.
(2015) The role of language processing in language acquisition. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 5(4), 409–453. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Rizzi, L.
(1991) Relativized minimality. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
(1997) The fine structure of the left periphery. In L. Haegeman (Ed.), Elements of grammar (pp.281–337). Dordrecht: Springer. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Roeper, T., & de Villiers, J. G.
(1994) Lexical links in the Wh-chain. In B. Lust, G. Hermon, & J. Kornfilt (Eds.), Syntactic theory and first language acquisition: Cross linguistic perspectives, Vol. II: Binding, dependencies and learnability (pp.357–390). Hillsdale, NJ; Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
(2011) The acquisition path for wh-questions. In J. G. de Villiers, & T. Roeper (Eds.), Handbook of generative approaches to language acquisition (pp.189–246). Dordrecht: Springer. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Schulz, B.
(2004) A Minimalist account of partial wh-movement. Unpublished manuscript, University of Hawaii.Google Scholar
Seymour, H. N., Roeper, T., & de Villiers, J. G.
(2005) DELV-NR (Diagnostic evaluation of language variation) norm-referenced test. San Antonio, TX: The Psychological Corporation.Google Scholar
Szabolsci, A., & Zwarts, F.
(1992) Unbounded dependencies and the algebraic semantics. Lecture notes of the Third European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information. Saarbrücken, Germany, August 1991.Google Scholar
Thornton, R.
(2008) Why continuity. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 26(1), 107–146. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Wexler, K.
(1998) Very early parameter setting and the unique checking constraint: A new explanation of the optional infinitive stage. Lingua, 106(1–4), 23–79. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by other publications

de Villiers, Jill, Jessica Kotfila & Tom Roeper
2020.  In New Trends in Language Acquisition Within the Generative Perspective [Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, 49], ► pp. 239 ff. Crossref logo
Lutken, C. Jane, Géraldine Legendre & Akira Omaki
2020. Syntactic Creativity Errors in Children's Wh‐Questions. Cognitive Science 44:7 Crossref logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 04 january 2021. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.