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Syntactic Creativity Errors in Children's Wh-Questions
C Jane Lutken1, Géraldine Legendre1, Akira Omaki2
1Department of Cognitive Science, Johns Hopkins University.
Cognitive Science
|July 2, 2020
Summary
Children
Area of Science:
- Child language acquisition
- Developmental psycholinguistics
- Syntactic development
Background:
- Children sometimes produce ungrammatical sentences in their target language that are grammatical in other languages.
- Medial wh-question errors (e.g., "What do you think who the cat chased?") are a well-documented example.
- These errors have been interpreted as evidence for innate syntactic parameters guiding language learning.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the nature of medial wh-question errors in English-speaking children.
- To challenge the interpretation that these errors reflect immature grammatical knowledge.
- To explore the relationship between production and comprehension of these structures.
Main Methods:
- Replicated previous findings on medial wh-question errors in sentence production (Experiment 1).
- Conducted comprehension experiments to assess children's interpretation of these structures (Experiment 2).
- Examined the correlation between production and comprehension errors (Experiment 3).
Main Results:
- Medial wh-question errors were replicated in children's sentence production.
- Less evidence was found for children assigning interpretations consistent with medial wh-question errors.
- No correlation was observed between production and comprehension errors.
Conclusions:
- The findings challenge the view that medial wh-question errors stem from immature grammatical knowledge.
- These errors may instead arise from limitations in children's sentence production mechanisms.
- This suggests a more nuanced understanding of syntactic development in early language acquisition.
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