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Related Experiment Video

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Portable Intermodal Preferential Looking (IPL): Investigating Language Comprehension in Typically Developing Toddlers and Young Children with Autism

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Subject-auxiliary inversion errors and wh-question acquisition: 'what children do know'?

C F Rowland¹, J M Pine

¹Institute of Behavioural Sciences, University of Derby, UK. c.rowland@derby.ac.uk

Journal of Child Language

|March 31, 2000

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Children learn wh-questions by memorizing specific word combinations, not by applying abstract grammar rules. This finding supports constructivist theories of early language acquisition and distributional learning.

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Area of Science:

Developmental Psycholinguistics
Child Language Acquisition
Linguistic Theory

Background:

Early wh-question development in children is complex, involving both correct production and subject-auxiliary inversion errors.
Existing movement rule accounts struggle to fully explain the observed patterns in early wh-question formation.

Purpose of the Study:

To analyze correct wh-question production and subject-auxiliary inversion errors in a child's early data.
To evaluate the explanatory power of movement rule accounts versus lexically-specific formulaic learning.

Main Methods:

Analysis of longitudinal wh-question data from a single child (ages 2;3.4 to 4;10.23).
Comparison of observed inversion patterns with predictions from lexically-specific input frequencies and constructivist models.

Main Results:

Movement rule accounts failed to explain the child's wh-question patterning.
The child's data aligns with learning lexically-specific wh-word + auxiliary combinations based on maternal input frequency.
Correctly inverted wh-questions can emerge without an explicit subject-auxiliary inversion rule.

Conclusions:

Early wh-question development is better explained by distributional learning of specific lexical formulae than by abstract movement rules.
Findings support constructivist theories emphasizing input-driven learning mechanisms in early multi-word speech.
The study has implications for understanding grammatical development theories, contrasting rule-based and constructivist perspectives.