Production Of Wh-questions Research Articles

Morphosyntactic development in German-speaking individuals with Down syndrome-longitudinal data.

The present study provides longitudinal data on the development of receptive and expressive grammar in children and adolescents with Down syndrome and addresses the role of nonverbal cognitive abilities and verbal short-term memory for morphosyntactic development. Seventeen German-speaking individuals with Down syndrome (aged 4;6-17;1 years at first testing (T1)) were assessed twice, 4;4-6;6 years apart. For a subset of five participants, there was also a third assessment 2 years after the second. Receptive grammar, nonverbal cognition, and verbal short-term memory were tested using standardized measures. For expressive grammar, elicitation tasks were used to assess the production of subject-verb agreement and of wh-questions. At group level, the participants showed a significant increase in grammar comprehension from T1 to T2. However, progress diminished with increasing chronological age. Notable growth could not be observed beyond the age of 10 years.With respect to expressive grammatical abilities, progress was limited to those participants who had mastered verbal agreement inflection around age 10 years. Individuals who did not master verbal agreement by late childhood achieved no progress in producing wh-questions, either.There was an increase in nonverbal cognitive abilities in the majority of participants. Results for verbal short-term memory followed a similar pattern as those for grammar comprehension. Finally, neither nonverbal cognition nor verbal short-term memory were related to changes in receptive or expressive grammar. The results point to a slowdown in the acquisition of receptive grammar which starts before the teenage years. For expressive grammar, improvement in wh-question production only occurred in individuals with good performance in subject-verb agreement marking, which suggests that the latter might have a trigger function for further grammatical development in German-speaking individuals with Down syndrome. The study provides no indication that nonverbal cognitive abilities or verbal short-term memory performance determined the receptive or expressive development. The results lead to clinical implications for language therapy.

The effect of input in the child production of Wh-questions in Brazilian Portuguese

No português brasileiro (PB), podemos fazer perguntas movendo o elemento interrogativo à esquerda (“O que o gato comeu __?”) ou mantendo-o in situ (“O gato comeu o quê?”). As estratégias parecem, à primeira vista, opcionais e o QU-in situ é reportado como uma estratégia produtiva no PB paulistano adulto (LOPES-ROSSI, 1996; OUSHIRO, 2012). Todavia, estudos com base no PB paulistano infantil espontâneo observam que as crianças quase nunca (ou nunca) produzem essa opção (SIKANSI, 1999; GROLLA, 2000; GROLLA, 2009). Já no dialeto falado em Vitória da Conquista (BA), observado por Lessa-de-Oliveira (2003), a construção emerge bem cedo na fala das crianças, sendo o mais utilizado no input recebido por elas. Para a autora, as crianças seguem um percurso de aquisição das estruturas interrogativas guiado por sua frequência no input. Com o objetivo de explorar a ordem de emergência das estratégias interrogativas na fala infantil e comparar ao input recebido pelas crianças, observamos um corpus de dados naturalísticos de cinco crianças falantes de PB paulistano, com faixa etária entre 1;02.28 e 4;11.12. Em nossos dados, as crianças preferiram o QU-movido, enquanto os adultos optaram mais vezes pelo QU-que. Além disso, o QU-in situ, sendo a estratégia menos utilizada pelas crianças, no geral, foi produtiva na fala adulta. Os resultados indicam que uma alta frequência no input de dada construção não induz necessariamente a sua maior produtividade na fala infantil.

Acquiring Syntactic Variability: The Production of Wh-Questions in Children and Adults Speaking Akan

This paper investigates the predictions of the Derivational Complexity Hypothesis by studying the acquisition of wh-questions in 4- and 5-year-old Akan-speaking children in an experimental approach using an elicited production and an elicited imitation task. Akan has two types of wh-question structures (wh-in-situ and wh-ex-situ questions), which allows an investigation of children’s acquisition of these two question structures and their preferences for one or the other. Our results show that adults prefer to use wh-ex-situ questions over wh-in-situ questions. The results from the children show that both age groups have the two question structures in their linguistic repertoire. However, they differ in their preferences in usage in the elicited production task: while the 5-year-olds preferred the wh-in-situ structure over the wh-ex-situ structure, the 4-year-olds showed a selective preference for the wh-in-situ structure in who-questions. These findings suggest a developmental change in wh-question preferences in Akan-learning children between 4 and 5 years of age with a so far unobserved u-shaped developmental pattern. In the elicited imitation task, all groups showed a strong tendency to maintain the structure of in-situ and ex-situ questions in repeating grammatical questions. When repairing ungrammatical ex-situ questions, structural changes to grammatical in-situ questions were hardly observed but the insertion of missing morphemes while keeping the ex-situ structure. Together, our findings provide only partial support for the Derivational Complexity Hypothesis.

Coconuts and curtain cakes: The production of wh-questions in ASD.

Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have been found to exhibit difficulties in wh-question production. It is unclear whether these difficulties are pragmatic or syntactic in nature. The current study used a question elicitation task to assess the production of subject and object wh-questions of children with ASD in two different languages (Hebrew and French) wherein the syntactic structure of wh-questions is different, a fact that may contribute to better understanding of the underlying deficits affecting wh-question production. Crucially, beyond the general correct/error rate we also performed an in-depth analysis of error types, comparing syntactic to pragmatic errors and comparing the distribution of errors in the ASD group to that of children with typical development (TD) and children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). Correct production rates were found to be similar for the ASD and DLD groups, but error analysis revealed important differences between the ASD groups in the two languages and the DLD group. The Hebrew- and French ASD groups were found to produce pragmatic errors, which were not found in children with DLD. The pragmatic errors were similar in the two ASD groups. Syntactic errors were affected by the structure of each language. Our results have shown that although the two ASD groups come from different countries and speak different languages, the correct production rates and more importantly, the error types were very similar in the two ASD groups, and very different compared to TD children and children with DLD.Implications: Our results highlight the importance of creating research tasks that test different linguistic functions independently and strengthen the need for conducting fine-grained error analysis to differentiate between groups and gain insights into the deficits underlying each of them.

PRACTICE IS IMPORTANT BUT HOW ABOUT ITS QUALITY?

AbstractThis study explored the impact of contextualized practice on second language (L2) learners’ production of wh-questions in the L2 classroom. It examined the quality of practice (correct vs. incorrect production) and the contribution of declarative knowledge to proceduralization. Thirty-four university-level English as a foreign language learners first completed a declarative knowledge test. Then, they engaged in various communicative activities over five weeks. Their production of wh-questions was coded for accuracy (absence of errors) and fluency (speech rate, mean length of pauses, and repair phenomena). Improvement was measured as the difference between the first and last practice sessions. The results showed that accuracy, speech rate, and pauses improved but with distinct patterns. Regression models showed that declarative knowledge did not predict accuracy or fluency; however, declarative knowledge assisted the learners to engage in targetlike behaviors at the initial stage of proceduralization. Furthermore, whereas production of accurate wh-questions predicted accuracy improvement, it had no impact on fluency.

Subjecthood and linear order in linguistic encoding: Evidence from the real-time production of wh-questions in English and Mandarin Chinese

Abstract We use visual world eye-tracking to provide a first look into the real-time production of an under-researched but communicatively crucial construction – wh-questions. We investigate whether the transition from abstract message to highly-structured utterances (linguistic encoding) is driven by linear order (positional processing) or subjecthood assignment (functional processing). Experiment 1 decouples positional and functional processes by comparing production of English declaratives versus object wh-questions (‘Which nurses did the maids tickle?’). Experiment 2 compares the production of declaratives versus object wh-questions in Mandarin Chinese to investigate potential information-focus effects on linguistic encoding and tests whether Experiment 1’s findings could be due to focus. Experiment 1 found that even though the articulation of a sentence is necessarily linear, speakers do not necessarily encode sentences in accordance with the linear order in which the words are uttered. Experiment 2 suggests that information-focus does not guide speakers' eye-movements during linguistic encoding.

The production of wh-questions in Italian-speaking children with SLI

ABSTRACTWe aim at determining whether 7-year-old Italian-speaking children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI): (1) have problems with the production of wh- questions; (2) display a subject/object asymmetry in producing which- and who questions; (3) attempt to simplify questions, especially which- questions; (4) have difficulties with movement and verbal agreement in wh- questions. We elicited subject and object who and which NP questions in 10 children with SLI (M = 7;2), in 10 chronological age (CA)-matched controls (M = 7;2) and 10 language-matched controls (M = 5;2). Results showed that (1) children with SLI produced fewer questions than both control groups; (2) a subject/object asymmetry was observed in who questions but not in which NP questions; (3) which NP questions were more problematic than who questions; (4) children with SLI produced more agreement errors and resorted to simplification strategies to avoid wh- question production. Results point to a grammatical deficit due to the computation of complex grammatical relations and suggest that there is a misalignment among pieces of linguistic competence needed to form Italian wh- questions (wh- movement and agreement computation). Outcomes have implications for clinical assessment recommending the production of wh- questions to be considered in the evaluation of SLI in Italian.

Investigating the Grammatical and Pragmatic Origins of Wh-Questions in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders.

Compared to typically developing children, children with autism (ASD) show delayed production of wh-questions. It is currently controversial the degree to which such deficits derive from social-pragmatic requirements and/or because these are complex grammatical structures. The current study employed the intermodal preferential looking (IPL) paradigm, which reduces social-pragmatic demands. The IPL paradigm can help distinguish these proposals, as successful comprehension promotes the “pragmatics-origins” argument whereas comprehension difficulties would implicate a “grammatical-origins” argument. Additionally, we tested both the linguistic and social explanations by assessing the contributions of children's early grammatical knowledge (i.e., SVO word order) and their social-pragmatic scores on the Vineland to their later wh-question comprehension. Fourteen children with ASD and 17 TD children, matched on language level, were visited in their homes at 4-month intervals. Comprehension of wh-questions and SVO word order were tested via IPL: the wh-question video showed a costumed horse and bird serving as agents or patients of familiar transitive actions. During the test trials, they were displayed side by side with directing audios (e.g., “What did the horse tickle?”, “What hugged the bird?”, “Where is the horse/bird?”). Children's eye movements were coded offline; the DV was their percent looking to the named item during test. To show comprehension, children should look longer at the named item during a where-question than during a subject-wh or object-wh question. Results indicated that TD children comprehended both subject and object wh-questions at 32 months of age. Comprehension of object-wh questions emerged chronologically later in children with ASD compared to their TD peers, but at similar levels of language. Moreover, performance on word order and social-pragmatic scores independently predicted both groups' later performance on wh-question comprehension. Our findings indicate that both grammar and social-pragmatics are implicated in the comprehension of wh-questions. The “grammatical-origins” argument is supported because the ASD group did not reveal earlier and stable comprehension of wh-questions; furthermore, their performance on SVO word order predicted their later success in linguistic processing of wh-questions. The “pragmatic-origins” argument is also supported because children's earlier socialization and communication scores strongly predicted their successful performance on wh-question comprehension.

Melodic intonation therapy applied to the production of questions in aphasia

Background: Melodic intonation therapy (MIT) is a treatment approach used to facilitate verbal production in adults with aphasia by combining melodic intoning and rhythmic tapping. Although MIT was developed in the early 1970s, there is limited empirical evidence documenting specific behavioural outcomes.Aims: Two individuals with chronic Broca’s aphasia and acquired apraxia of speech received MIT applied to wh-questions in the context of multiple baseline designs. Methods & Procedures: Linguistic principles were applied to the selection of items used for treatment and measurement of generalisation effects. The dependent variables were (a) production of wh-questions and (b) articulatory accuracy via percentage of consonants correct in the production of wh-questions.Results: For Participant 1, there was an increase in the production of wh-questions for only one wh-morpheme which was maintained at 6 weeks post-treatment. For Participant 2, there was an increase in production of wh-questions for two wh-morphemes; however, performance was variable and declined by 6 weeks post-treatment. For both participants, there were modest gains in percentage of consonants correct for treated and generalisation items at 6 weeks post-treatment.Conclusions: There were limited gains in the production of wh-questions for both participants with the application of MIT. However, there were modest gains in percentage of consonants correct. MIT as applied in this investigation to wh-questions utilising linguistic principles did not result in improvement in the formulation and production of wh-questions, but treatment did have positive effects on articulatory accuracy for treatment and generalisation items. Additional research is needed to further examine the efficacy of MIT for outcomes involving both language and speech production.

Subjacency Revisited: Is it Real or a Reflex of Performance Biases?

In the studies of wh-in-situ in Korean/Japanese, grammaticality judgments over wh-island constructions have been notoriously unstable, variable, and even chaotic. For this prevailing controversy over the Subjacency issue, Kitagawa (2005) claims that the alleged Subjacency effect reported for wh-island constructions in Japanese is a “pseudo-grammatical” phenomenon; that native speakers’ preference over the subordinate wh-scope interpretation in wh-island constructions is a reflection of native speakers’ performance-related biases imposed on the perception and production of wh-questions. In this paper I will argue that Subjacency does exist as a real (i.e., formal) syntactic constraint, serving as a pivotal condition on ruling out illegitimate wh-questions in the narrow syntax; that the confusion and chaos in the judgment of Korean/Japanese wh-island constructions stem from the sound-meaning mismatch in the interpretation of wh-questions at the SM interface, which is the locus of linguistic variation in detectable forms. In so doing, I will show how Jung’s (2015) alternative analysis of wh-constructions can capture the precise nature of wh-licensing and Subjacency controversy in wh-in-situ languages like Korean/Japanese.

Production of wh-questions by Japanese EFL learners: Preliminary classroom data collection

Morishita, Miwa and Yasunari Harada. 2015. Production of wh-questions by Japanese EFL learners: preliminary classroom data collection. Linguistic Research 32 (Special Edition), 1-13. High School Course of Study for English set forth by the Japanese Ministry of Education started emphasizing communication and communicative approach around the year 1990.​ In recent years, acquisition of communicative competence has become the most important objective of English language education in Japan as globalization affects diverse aspects of governmental and enterprise sectors of the Japanese society. On the other hand, while asking the right questions at the right time is an integral part of effective oral interactions, Japanese EFL learners experience processing and other difficulties in doing so. First, in classroom situations, students are generally discouraged from asking the teacher, and each other, any direct questions. Second, this leads to a general lack of communicative intelligence among those students in coming up with interesting things to ask. Third, producing English question sentences on the fly poses non-negligible processing difficulties for Japanese EFL learners. In Japanese, question sentences are formed simply by adding the question marker “ka” at the end of a sentence without changing the word order. In contrast,

Wh-questions in child L2 French: Derivational complexity and its interactions with L1 properties, length of exposure, age of exposure, and the input

This study investigates how derivational complexity interacts with first language (L1) properties, second language (L2) input, age of first exposure to the target language, and length of exposure in child L2 acquisition. We compared elicited production of wh-questions in French in two groups of 15 participants each, one with L1 English (mean age 8 years 10 months or 8;10) and one with L1 Dutch (mean age 6;3), which were further subdivided into subgroups matched for the different variables under examination. Although in their L1s wh-questions display wh-movement and subject–verb/aux inversion, the learners did not perform similarly. A high number of wh-in-situ questions (i.e. the least complex option) was produced by the L1-English children, suggesting that derivational complexity can override L1 influence. In the L1-Dutch group, questions with overt wh-movement were more frequent. This may stem from the influence of generalized XP-movement to the left periphery in Dutch. Inversion (i.e. the most complex option) was rare in both groups and was related to contact with formal schooling. These results hold across the different subgroups, which suggests not only that complexity plays a role in child L2 acquisition, but also that its effects may differ according to the properties of the L1.

Oti, na and Negative Markers in the L1 Production of Greek wh-Questions

The present paper investigates the use of oti, na and negation in wh-question production in L1 Greek. Children’s preference is explored for use of oti and na, and for use of the negation markers ðen and min. These elements have been extensively studied from a theoretical perspective, yet they remain poorly investigated from an acquisition perspective, hence the present study. In long-distance wh-questions na is predicted to be preferred over oti due to its stronger entrenchment as clause-introducing element and as mood marker; in short-distance questions, however, na is predicted to be less preferred than the indicative due to the enriched modal semantics it carries in matrix clause environments. In negative matrix questions ðen is expected to be the preferred choice, since min occurs with na, which carries an extra semantic/pragmatic load. To test these predictions, a group of ninety four-to-seven-year-old Greek children participated in elicited production tasks designed mainly along the methodological principles of Crain and Thornton (1998). The results were generally in line with initial expectations. Children resorted mostly to na in long-distance contexts and to the semantically simpler indicative questions in short-distance contexts. With negative questions, higher accurate use rates were attested for target ðen than for target min, reflecting the simpler semantics associated with the former. Overall, these findings provide evidence that children opt for economy, with semantic factors contributing to their economy-based choices.

Comprehension of Wh‐Questions Precedes Their Production in Typical Development and Autism Spectrum Disorders

Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) rarely produce wh-questions (e.g. "What hit the book?") in naturalistic speech. It is unclear if this is due to social-pragmatic difficulties, or if grammatical deficits are also involved. If grammar is impaired, production of wh-questions by rote memorization might precede comprehension of similar forms. In a longitudinal study, 15 children with ASD and 18 initially language-matched typically developing (TD) toddlers were visited in their homes at 4-month intervals across a 3-year period. The wh-question task was presented via intermodal preferential looking. Silent "hitting" events (e.g. an apple hitting a flower) were followed by test trials in which the apple and flower were juxtaposed on the screen. During test trials, subject-wh- and object-wh-question audios were sequentially presented (e.g. "What hit the flower?" or "What did the apple hit?"). Control audios were also presented (e.g. "Where's the apple/flower?"). Children's eye movements were coded off-line, frame by frame. To show reliable comprehension, children should look longer to the named item (i.e. apple or flower) during the "where" questions but less at the named item during the subject-wh and object-wh-questions. To compare comprehension to production, we coded 30-min spontaneous speech samples drawn from mother-child interactions at each visit. Results indicated that comprehension of subject- and object-wh-questions was delayed in children with ASD compared with age-matched TD children, but not when matched on overall language levels. Additionally, both groups comprehended wh-questions before producing similar forms, indicating that development occurred in a similar manner. This paper discusses the implications of our findings for language acquisition in ASD.

The Comprehension and Production of Wh-Questions in Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Children

Hearing loss during the critical period for language acquisition restricts spoken language input. This input limitation, in turn, may hamper syntactic development. This study examined the comprehension, production, and repetition of Wh-questions in deaf or hard-of-hearing (DHH) children. The participants were 11 orally trained Hebrew-speaking children aged 9.1-12.4 with moderate-to-profound hearing loss from birth, who consistently used hearing aids or cochlear implants and who had difficulties understanding relative clauses. Experiment 1 tested the comprehension of Wh-questions using a picture selection task, comparing subject with object questions and who- with which-questions; Experiment 2 tested the production of subject and object who-questions using an elicitation task; and Experiment 3 tested the repetition of Wh-questions and other structures derived by Wh-movement. All the DHH participants showed difficulty in the comprehension, production, and repetition of object questions, and their performance was significantly below that of hearing children. In contrast, they repeated embedded sentences without movement well, indicating that their deficit is in syntactic movement rather than embedding or the CP node in the syntactic tree. The results provide additional evidence that DHH children have difficulties with Wh-movement and emphasize that Wh-questions, which are crucial for communication, can be severely impaired in these children.

Collaborative Syntactic Priming Activities and EFL Learners’ Production of Wh-questions

Syntactic priming is the tendency for a speaker to produce a structure that was encountered in recent discourse and is measured by calculating how frequently speakers use the modelled structures as opposed to alternatives. Recent lab-based studies have shown that carrying out syntactic priming activities with trained interlocutors positively affects Thai EFL learners’ subsequent production of wh-questions. The current study explores whether carrying out priming activities with peers in a classroom context also facilitates subsequent production. In their integrated skills English course, Thai EFL learners (N = 42) either completed collaborative syntactic priming activities or followed the regular curriculum. Analysis of post-test data indicated that learners who carried out the priming activities subsequently produced significantly more wh-questions with supplied auxiliary verbs than learners who followed the regular curriculum. Pedagogical considerations for the use of collaborative syntactic priming activities in L2 classrooms are discussed.

Speculations About Early Syntax: The Production of Wh-questions by Normally Developing French Children and French Children with SLI

Aquest article examina la producció espontània (i elicitada) de preguntes en tres nens francesos amb un desenvolupament normal (1;8–2;10) i onze nens francesos amb transtorn específic del llenguatge (3;10–9;1). El francès presenta tres tipus de preguntes de constituents (amb qu- in-situ, amb trasllat de qu- sense inversió i amb trasllat de qu- amb inversió) de complexitat sintàctica variable, que permeten doncs una investigació detallada de la competència sintàctica. Els resultats mostren que els dos grups de nens prefereixen les preguntes de qu- in-situ i que eviten la inversió. Els infinitius són molt rars en totes les preguntes, mentre els subjectes nuls són rars en preguntes amb trasllat de qu- però es donen en preguntes de qu- in-situ en els nens amb desenvolupament normal. Els nens amb transtorn específic del llenguatge no produeixen infinitius a les preguntes de qu-, però permeten els subjectes nuls en tot tipus de preguntes. L’experiment d’elicitació confirma aquesta tendència, encara que els nens amb transtorn específic del llenguatge tenien més dificultats amb el trasllat que els altres. Intentem d’explicar aquests resultats des de la prespectiva de la truncació i suposem que els nens petits eviten el trasllat mitjançant la derivació de preguntes de qu- in-situ amb un element de qu- a la posició de nucli del Sintagma Interrogatiu que estableix una relació de Concordança amb l’element in-situ. És possible que els nens amb transtorn específic del llenguatge estenguin aquesta derivació econòmica a totes les preguntes de qu-.

An investigation of the morpho-syntactic abilities of Afrikaans-speaking preschoolers

A lack of standardised assessment instruments for use with Afrikaans-speaking children compels those who need to assess their expressive morpho-syntactic abilities to either devise their own informal assessment tools or make use of spontaneous language samples. However, to interpret the results of these, normative data on the language development of Afrikaans-speaking children are needed. At present, no such data are available on the morpho-syntactic abilities of Afrikaans-speaking children. The present study aimed at gathering such data. Eight typically-developing monolingual children (one boy and one girl of three, four, five and six years) from Afrikaans-speaking homes participated. Tasks were administered to assess comprehension and production of grammatical features related to number, person, case and tense as well as questions forms, binding relations and passive constructions. Increased correct responses with increased age were observed for genitive case and tense comprehension, simple wh-question production, comprehension and production of binding relations, and comprehension of passive constructions, but not for number comprehension and production, person and case comprehension and production on pronouns, tense production, comprehension of question forms, and production of passive constructions. The results indicate that the morpho-syntactic abilities of Afrikaans-speaking six-year-olds do not yet resemble those of adult speakers of the language; the implication is that, in Afrikaans, morpho-syntactic development continues after the age of 6.

Developmental perspectives on Specific Language Impairment: Evidence from the production of wh-questions by Greek SLI children over time

This study investigates the performance of seven Greek SLI children on the production of wh-questions at two points in their linguistic development. In particular, it compares and discusses the results of two experiments on the production of subject and object wh-questions; the second experiment was carried out 5 years after the first one. Despite the SLI children's significant improvement in the production of subject and object wh-questions, the results indicated persistent problems with specific grammatical operations. Adopting a developmental perspective, issues concerning the linguistic deficits in SLI are discussed.

Wh-question production in German Broca’s aphasia

Wh-question production in German Broca’s aphasia