The acquisition of interrogatives

In this article we describe the nature and sequence of acquisition of wh-questions by Catalan and/or Spanish speaking children. The framework assumes that linguistic structures are constructed gradually, progressing from specific to more abstract structures. Our corpus consists on longitudinal data...

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Detalhes bibliográficos
Autores: Serrat, Elisabet|||0000-0003-0702-0082, Capdevila i Batet, Montserrat|||0000-0001-5448-6542
Tipo de documento: artigo
Data de publicação:2001
País:España
Recursos:Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Repositório:Dipòsit Digital de Documents de la UAB
Idioma:inglês
OAI Identifier:oai:ddd.uab.cat:288358
Acesso em linha:https://ddd.uab.cat/record/288358
https://dx.doi.org/urn:doi:10.1174/021037001316899785
Access Level:Acesso embargado
Palavra-chave:Catalan and Spanish acquisition
Interrogative sentences
Wh-pronouns
Descrição
Resumo:In this article we describe the nature and sequence of acquisition of wh-questions by Catalan and/or Spanish speaking children. The framework assumes that linguistic structures are constructed gradually, progressing from specific to more abstract structures. Our corpus consists on longitudinal data from 10 children between 17 months and 3 years of age. The study focused on: the syntactic structure of each sentence, the errors produced, the wh-words, and the type of verbs used. The results show that children go through a first stage characterized by the formulaic or semi-formulaic nature of wh-questions, and only a few interrogative particles are used in very specific structures. Later, interrogatives appear with other wh-pronouns and other types of verbs, and no errors were found in their syntactic constructions. These results differ from previous studies carried out with English-speaking subjects.