Scope-marking Strategies in the Acquisition of Long Distance wh-Questions in French and Dutch

Abstract

This paper reports the results of an elicited production task of Long Distance (LD) wh-questions conducted with typically developing French- and Dutch-speaking children aged four and six, and adult control groups for each language. It is shown that besides input-convergent wh-questions, in both languages children use nontarget strategies to express scope. While in both French and Dutch children produce Partial Movement and wh-copying questions, only French children use Partial Movement without an overt scope-marker in the left periphery of the matrix clause. We argue that our results are consistent with the Derivational Complexity hypothesis put forward by Jakubowicz (2004, 2005). Moreover our results confirm that parametric choices regarding the position of both the wh-word and the verb in the sentence are already set at the ages considered here.

Partial Wh-Movement and Wh-Copying in Dutch: Evidence for an Indirect Dependency Approach

“…Fanselow, 2006;Müller, 1997;Van Kampen, 1997). This observation seems to be corroborated by a recent elicitation study by Jakubowicz & Strik (2008), where Dutch adult subjects predominantly produced standard LD wh-movement constructions, contrary to Dutch children, who produced a considerable amount of partial wh-movement and wh-copy constructions. The absence of partial whmovement and wh-copying in Dutch is however surprising, since these constructions do show up in closely related languages including German, (McDaniel, 1989), Frisian (Hiemstra, 1986) and Afrikaans (Du Plessis, 1977), and also in a large number of Dutch dialects (cf.…”

Long-distance wh-movement and long-distance wh-movement avoidance in L2 English: Evidence from French and Bulgarian speakers

“…Medial wh-constructions were first attested in child L1 English by see also McDaniel et al, 1995) and included wh-copying, as in (2), and wh-scope marking, as in (3). 2 Similar constructions were subsequently attested in the L1 acquisition of other languages, including Dutch (Jakubowicz and Strik, 2008;van Kampen, 1997), French (Jakubowicz and Strik, 2008;Oiry and Demirdache, 2006), Spanish (Gutierrez, 2004a), and Basque (Gutierrez, 2004b). 3 Furthermore, studies have shown that such constructions may also exist in the L2 English of speakers whose L1s include Japanese (Schulz, 2006;Wakabayashi and Okawara, 2003;Yamane, 2003), German (Schulz, 2006), and bilingual Spanish/Basque (Gutierrez, 2005).…”

“…Apart from these general goals, the specific purpose of this article is to apply the derivational complexity hypothesis, henceforth DCH (Jakubowicz, 2004(Jakubowicz, , 2005(Jakubowicz, , 2011Jakubowicz and Strik, 2008;Strik and Pérez-Leroux, 2011) to L2 data. While this hypothesis has so far been used mostly in L1 acquisition, I show that it has strong potential in adult L2 acquisition (for a study testing this hypothesis in child L2, see also Prévost et al, 2010).…”

“…Another relevant claim has been that if a given language allows for different options, children will acquire the more economical ones before acquiring the less economical ones (Hulk and Zuckerman, 2000;Zuckerman, 2001). Jakubowicz (2004; and Jakubowicz and Strik (2008) propose that language acquisition is affected by developmental constraints, such as working memory capacity, and is sensitive to the computational complexity of the derivation. The claim is that less complex derivations are 'input convergent', that is, correctly spelled out or pronounced, before more complex ones (Jakubowicz and Strik, 2008: 106).…”

Periferias esquerda e direita: assimetrias

“…Ora, se assumirmos uma métrica de complexidade em que cada nova operação (de movimento) aumenta o nível de complexidade da estrutura (cf. Jakubowicz, 2004Jakubowicz, , 2005Jakubowicz, , 2011Jakubowicz & Strik, 2008), esperaríamos resultados Revista da Associação Portuguesa de Linguística inversos aos encontrados nas crianças, i.e., esperaríamos percentagens de acerto superiores na compreensão de estruturas de topicalização do que nas de sujeitos periféricos à direita, já que nestas há mais um movimento do que naquelas.…”