Publications

Publication details [#55680]

Lely, Heather K. J. van der, Marijke Metz and Angeliek van Hout. 2012. Subject interpretation of object questions by Dutch 5-year-olds: The role of number agreement in comprehension. Linguistics in the Netherlands 29 : 97–110.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Place, Publisher
John Benjamins

Annotation

This paper investigated the interpretation of Dutch wie 'who'- and welke 'which'-questions in Dutch 5-year-olds. In contrast to wh-questions in many languages, Dutch wh-questions are structurally ambiguous between a subject and an object reading. It used test items in which the ambiguity was resolved by number agreement. The results suggest an overly strong subject-first bias in 5-year-olds. It is argued that number agreement is too weak a cue for children to overcome this tendency.