Questions, the acquisition of
Questions (interrogatives) are utterances that query a statement or request information. Much
of the work on questions focuses on explaining why English-learning children make word
order error.
Questions can be divided into two types. The first are yes-no questions, so-called because, at
minimum, they require yes or no as an answer (do you want some cake? can I go on the
swings?).The second are wh-questions, which are preceded by a wh-element (e.g. in English,
what are you doing, why are you doing that?). These can be further subdivided into three
types. First are subject wh-questions, which requests information about the sentence subject
(i.e. queries the subject word/phrase missing from the equivalent declarative; e.g. who went to
the park?). Second are object wh-questions, in which the wh-word requests information about
the sentential object (i.e. queries the object word/phrase missing from the equivalent
declarative, e.g. what did you eat?). Third are adjunct wh-questions that request extra
information about an event, statement or idea (the type of information provided by an adjunct
to a declarative sentence, e.g. why did you go to the park?).
Most work on questions focuses on explaining why many English-speaking children make
word order errors. As a general rule, word order errors are very rare in children’s speech, so
their presence, in relatively large numbers, in English children’s questions is surprising. In
particular, both typically developing children and children with SLI produce errors in
object/adjunct wh-questions, in which they fail to invert the position of the subject and
auxiliary. This leads to subject-auxiliary inversion (SAI) errors such as why he hasn't got
any dinner and what I'm gonna do (instead of why hasn’t he got any dinner? and what am I
gonna do?). Two other errors are also often categorised as uninversion errors: raising errors
in which the auxiliary is omitted and the tense and agreement marking remains on the main
verb (e.g. what we saw? instead of what did we see?) and double marking errors in which
tense and agreement are marked twice, once before and once after the verb (e.g. why can he
can’t go to the park?). Interestingly, children learning other languages (e.g. German,
Swedish, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish) do not make these errors, though there is some
evidence that French children may.
Crucially, uninversion errors co-occur with correct questions in children’s speech. For
example, William and Teresa Labov reported that in one day, three-year-old Jessie, produced
both the correct questions what does sun do to snow? and what do you do when you want to
be rich? and the errors why you said to Daddy you might be kidding? and why we can’t wear
sandals for walking in the woods?. As a result, the challenge for theorists is to explain why
English children, who are capable of producing correct questions, sometimes produce errors.
According to theories within the principles and parameters framework, children are born with
innate linguistic principles, which apply across all languages, and innate linguistic
parameters, which have to be set to the properties of the target language after exposure to the
linguistic environment. Children make errors because they have not yet correctly set the
parameters specifying when subject-auxiliary inversion (SAI) must apply. This leads to
errors in some parts of the system. For example, one theory is children learn to apply SAI to
argument wh-questions (e.g. what did you see at the park?) before adjunct questions (e.g.
when did you go to the park?) because adjunct wh-words are initially misanalysed as being in
topic position of the inflectional phase (which would not trigger SAI). Another theory states
that children make errors because it takes time to learn the complex rules governing how
innate principles integrate with language-specific rules. For example, the presence and
positioning of auxiliary DO in English questions results from a peculiarity of English
grammar that requires the movement of tense and agreement but prohibits the movement of
main verbs. Children are said to make SAI errors with auxiliary DO until they have mastered
this English-specific restriction.
In each case, there is some evidence in the patterning of children’s errors to support the
theory. For example, some studies report that children make more errors with adjunct whwords (e.g. how, why) than argument wh-words (e.g. what) and more errors with auxiliary
DO than auxiliary BE. However, problems arise when we analyse the data in more detail,
because often the patterning of errors reflects a complex interaction between question type
and auxiliary type not predicted by the theories. For example, children seem to make as
many uninversion errors with modal auxiliaries as with auxiliary DO but only in whquestions not yes-no questions. Similarly, it seems that wh-words are only susceptible to
error when combined with certain auxiliaries. For example, in one analysis, 66% of one
child’s (Adam) how can questions contained SAI errors, but none of his how do questions.
These quite specific patterns of correct use and error are not captured by theories within the
principles and parameters framework.
An alternative explanation comes from item-based (constructivist) theories. On this model,
children learn grammatical constructions by first building up an inventory of item-based
frames (e.g. where’s X and what’s the X doing, where X stands for a slot in which the child
can insert an appropriate noun or noun phrase). Then, utilising basic generalisation
mechanisms such as analogy and schematization, the child abstracts across frames to build
more abstract constructions (e.g. object wh-questions). Questions based on item-based frames
will be resistant to error since the word order of the question is specified directly in the
frames. Questions for which the child has no frame available will have to be formed via
generalisation strategies, which means that they are more susceptible to error. This explains,
for example, why certain wh-words are only susceptible to error when combined with certain
auxiliaries. In fact, some studies have directly demonstrated that questions produced using
item-based frames contain fewer SAI errors than questions produced via generalisation
strategies.
There is also evidence for significantly lower error rates in questions based on highly
frequent (and, thus, early learnt) frames from both naturalistic and experimental studies.
However, a number of outliers remain that cannot be accommodated in this account. For
example, children produce a larger number of SAI errors with why can’t questions than we
would predict given the frequency of such questions in the input. This illustrates the broader
problem that children seem to make more errors with negative questions than we would
predict given the frequency with which they hear these questions.
Cross-references
Syntax (complex), development of; Syntactic development: Generative grammar perspective;
Syntactic development: Construction grammar perspective
Further Readings
Ben Ambridge, Caroline Rowland, Anna Theakston and Mike Tomasello. Comparing
different accounts of inversion errors in children’s non-subject questions: “What
experimental data can tell us?”. Journal of Child Language, 30, 519-557. (2006).
Marit Westergaard. Usage-based vs. Rule-based Learning: The Acquisition of Word Order in
Wh-Questions in English and Norwegian. Journal of Child Language, 36 (5), 1023-1051.
(2009)