What are you cookin' on a hot?: Movement constraints in the speech of a three-year-old blind child

Abstract

We consider an anomalous but internally consistent set of WH-questions produced by a 3½-year-old child. They are of theoretical interest because they appear to violate constraints against the movement of constituents out of noun phrases, thus raising questions about the conditions of applicability of such constraints. After giving an account of the probable sources of these questions in several kinds of verbal interactions between the child and his father, we propose that discourse patterns may affect the acquisition of sentence grammar in unexpected ways, and may even allow the language learner to temporarily modify the domain of applicability of universal constraints.

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