The development of language and its interaction with other aspects of cognition: the case of medial wh-questions in English and in Brazilian Portuguese

• Main Authors: Elaine Grolla, Adam Liter, Jeffrey Lidz
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina 2020-10-01
• Series: Ilha do Desterro
• Subjects: Language Acquisition; Experimental Study; Multi-clause Questions; Inhibition Control Capacity; Speech Production
• Online Access: https://periodicos.ufsc.br/index.php/desterro/article/view/72766

Preschool children acquiring English and Brazilian Portuguese display a peculiar behavior when prompted to produce multi-clause wh-questions. In elicited production tasks, structures with an extra wh-element in medial position are sometimes produced. Such medial questions are impossible in the adult languages being acquired. Following a hypothesis put forth by Grolla & Lidz (2018), we propose that children’s productions are not generated by children’s grammar, but reflect difficulties of their developing cognitive system. More specifically, we propose that children’s more limited inhibition control capacity leads them to pronounce elements with high activation levels in wrong places of the structure. Experimental data on both languages are provided which corroborate this claim. These data show that children with more limited inhibition control capacity are more likely to produce medial wh-questions.