International Centre for Language and Communicative Development: Corpus and Experimental Study: Children's Acquisition of Wh-questions, 2019

Corpus data analysis (Python scripts) audio recordings (audio files), stimuli (a complete OpenSesame Experiment file), transcribed and coded responses (.csv file) data analysis scripts (R files) from a training study described by the following abstract: Subject-auxiliary inversion in interrogatives has been a topic of great interest in language acquisition research, and has often been held up as evidence for the structure-dependence of grammar. This applies especially to wh- questions, which are argued to be structurally more complex than polar interrogatives. Non-inversion errors are of particular interest as they represent a rare case in which children reliably make errors involving word order. Usage-based and nativist approaches posit different representations and processes underlying children’s question formation and therefore predict different causes for these errors. Here, we explore the question of whether input statistics predict children’s spontaneous non-inversion errors with wh- questions. While previous work has focused primarily on the distributional properties of wh- words and auxiliaries themselves, we consider the statistical properties of additional subsequences. In particular, we look at properties of the non-inverted, errorful forms of questions. In keeping with recent evidence for multiword units in children’s comprehension and production, we explore the question of whether the frequency of uninverted subsequences (e.g., “she is going” in “what she is going to do?*”) is a good predictor of children’s errors. First, through a series of corpus analyses, we show that this is indeed the case. Second, we conduct an experiment in which children are asked to repeat wh-questions which, although matched for the n-grams in the well-formed questions, differ as to the n-gram frequencies of the crucial bigrams.