Kalender Details

Vortragende Person/Vortragende Personen:
Jane Lutken (Johns Hopkins University)

English-speaking preschoolers have been shown to make systematic errors in the production and comprehension of biclausal questions. For example, children produce questions like (1) where the medial wh-phrase who takes matrix scope (Thornton, 1990), and comprehend (2) as a question about the medial wh-phrase what (De Villiers & Roeper, 1995).

(1) What/who do you think who the cat chased?

 cf. Who do you think the cat chased?

(2) Q: How did the boy say what he caught?

Child’s answer: A fish! (as opposed to loudly)

Both errors suggest the medial wh-phrase is being treated as the contentful question word, while the initial wh-phrase is interpreted as a scope marker (SM). SM is a strategy attested in languages like German and Hindi, but not English. The co-presence of these errors in production and comprehension suggests children may temporarily adopt multiple UG licensed grammars (e.g. Yang, 2002; Legendre et al. 2002). However, the results of this study suggest that addressing aspects of the methodology of previous studies reduced these errors to 22% in production and only 8% in comprehension. A follow up task with a between-subjects design shows an asymmetry within participants: consistent production of SM did not pair with consistent SM interpretations.  If SM errors resulted from a competing grammar, we would expect to see evidence of SM in comprehension and production within an individual. This within-subjects study did not find such a correlation. This asymmetrical pattern does not support a competing grammar hypothesis. I will discuss how these errors shed light on the interaction of grammar and other cognitive processes such as immature planning and memory.