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

Abstract

This paper examines the spontaneous (and elicited) production of questions in 3 typically developing French children (1;8-2;10) and 11 French children with SLI (3;10-9;1).French has three types of constituent questions (Wh-in-situ, fronted Wh without inversion, fronted Wh with inversion) graded in syntactic complexity, allowing detailed investigation of syntactic competence.The results show that both groups of children greatly prefer Wh-in-situ over fronted Wh and avoid inversion.Infinitives are extremely rare in all questions, whereas null subjects are rare in fronted Wh-questions but occur in in-situ questions in typically developing children.SLI children do not produce infinitives in Wh-questions, but allow null subjects in all question types.The elicitation experiment confirmed these trends, though the SLI children had significantly more difficulties with movement than the normal children.A tentative account uses the truncation approach and the assumption that young children avoid movement by deriving in-situ questions with a Q-element in the head position of an Interrogative Phrase entering into an Agree relation with the element left in-situ.SLI children might extend this economic analysis to all Wh-questions. Key words: French questions, fronted Wh, Wh-in

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