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Comparing different accounts of inversion errors in children's non-subject wh-questions: ‘What experimental data can tell us?’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 August 2006

BEN AMBRIDGE ,
CAROLINE F. ROWLAND ,
ANNA L. THEAKSTON  and
MICHAEL TOMASELLO
BEN AMBRIDGE
Affiliation:
University of Liverpool, UK
CAROLINE F. ROWLAND
Affiliation:
University of Liverpool, UK
ANNA L. THEAKSTON
Affiliation:
University of Manchester, UK
MICHAEL TOMASELLO
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany
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Abstract

This study investigated different accounts of children's acquisition of non-subject wh-questions. Questions using each of 4 wh-words (what, who, how and why), and 3 auxiliaries (BE, DO and CAN) in 3sg and 3pl form were elicited from 28 children aged 3;6–4;6. Rates of non-inversion error (Who she is hitting?) were found not to differ by wh-word, auxiliary or number alone, but by lexical auxiliary subtype and by wh-word+lexical auxiliary combination. This finding counts against simple rule-based accounts of question acquisition that include no role for the lexical subtype of the auxiliary, and suggests that children may initially acquire wh-word+lexical auxiliary combinations from the input. For DO questions, auxiliary-doubling errors (What does she does like?) were also observed, although previous research has found that such errors are virtually non-existent for positive questions. Possible reasons for this discrepancy are discussed.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 33 , Issue 3 , August 2006 , pp. 519 - 557
Copyright
2006 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

We would like to thank the children, parents and teachers of Bishop Billsborrow Memorial Roman Catholic Primary School and St. Catherine's Roman Catholic Primary School, who took part in the research reported here. Our thanks are also due to Daniel Stahl for assistance with statistical analysis, and to two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on a previous version of this manuscript. This research was funded by a PhD Scholarship from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany and by an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship (PTA-026-27-0705), both to the first author.