Syntactic, semantic and pragmatic correlates of the acquisition of exhaustivity in Wh-questions: A study of Polish monolingual children

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis study investigates relationships between acquisition of exhaustivity in single and multiple wh-questions, mastery of semantic and pragmatic aspects of quantifier comprehension, and general skills in receptive grammar. The participants of the study were 25 Polish monolingual typically developing children aged 4;02–6;02, who were administered a set of tasks including the Exhaustive Wh-Questions Task, the Test for Reception of Grammar, version 2, and the Comprehension of Quantification Task. The selection of the tasks was motivated by the major linguistic accounts of exhaustivity. We found significant predictive relationships between single exhaustive wh-questions and both semantics of quantifiers and receptive grammar. In contrast, the scores in multiple wh-questions were predicted only by age, showing their delayed acquisition with respect to single wh-questions. However, this age-related difference was not accounted for by any of the linguistic variables tested. Crucially, the analyses revealed no relationships between the mastery of pragmatics of quantification (involving scalar implicature) and exhaustivity in wh-questions, suggesting that the two are not driven by a common pragmatic mechanism.