Wh-questions in child bilingual acquisition of French: Derivational complexity and cross-linguistic influence

Abstract

AbstractThis study investigates the development ofwh-questions in French in a group of bilingual French-Dutch children. Fifteen children (aged 4 to 8, mean age 6;03, first exposure to French under age 4 for most of the children) participated in an elicited production task. Their results were compared to those of 4-year-old and 6-year-old monolingual children from a previous study. In order to examine possible influence from Dutch, two main hypotheses with contrasting predictions are proposed: structural overlap and derivational complexity. The results show that the bilingual children exhibited the same developmental course forwh-questions as their monolingual peers. The majority of responses involvedwh-fronting without inversion, whereaswh-fronting with inversion, the only possible structure in Dutch, was not frequent. Therefore, the results do not provide clear evidence for influence from Dutch. Instead, they confirm that derivational complexity constrains the development ofwh-questions in French.