Medial-WH questions in language acquisition: grammatical knowledge or processing difficulties?

• Grant number: 13/22069-2
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research
• Start date: July 20, 2014
• End date: July 19, 2015
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics - Linguistic Theory and Analysis
• Principal Investigator: Elaine Bicudo Grolla
• Grantee: Elaine Bicudo Grolla
• Host Investigator: Jeffrey Lidz
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: University of Maryland, College Park, United States

Abstract

Young children show a peculiar behavior with respect to long distance WH-questions. In elicited production studies, sentences with an extra Wh-element in the intermediate specCP position are produced. These medial questions are not possible in the adult languages being acquired (English and Spanish, for example), but are grammatical in languages such as German and Frisian. It is generally proposed that these productions reflect a possibility made available by Universal Grammar. Although the child does not have positive evidence from the input for such constructions, they'd pass through a stage in development where these constructions are grammatical. The research being proposed here will investigate the development of medial wh-questions in monolingual children acquiring Brazilian Portuguese and English as their mother tongues. We developed a research protocol, based on Thornton (1990), which has been proven successful to elicit not only questions with the verb 'think' (as done by Thornton), but also negative questions and questions with the factive verb 'know'. The study proposes to address a yet unexplored idea, as it will try to map the types of syntactic restrictions that are obeyed (or not) by children when producing these medial wh-questions. The results of a preliminary study conducted with Brazilian children indicate that subjects produce medial questions in all conditions tested, violating some of the restrictions found in adult languages such as German and Frisian. Due to this behavior, one of the hypothesis raised is that these constructions might not be grammatical but might be the result of processing difficulties. (AU)