Wh-questions: Moving beyond the first phase

Abstract

The paper presents a feature-checking theory of wh-movement that attempts to accommodate both adult grammar and the path of acquisition by which children handle long distance movement, indirect questions and partial movement. Partial movement is not a grammatical option in English but it is adopted as an option in development. The account makes several predictions about the performance of children with specific language impairment (SLI), and also predicts a particular advantage for children who speak African American English (AAE) over those who speak Mainstream American English (MAE). The empirical data are taken from a study of 590 children, both typically developing and language-impaired, and both AAE and MAE speaking, aged four to nine years. The tasks involved answering wh-questions after stories as part of the field-testing of a new language assessment instrument. The questions included multi-clause questions with or without medial wh-complementizers. The predictions are borne out that children with language impairment have prolonged difficulty with real long distance movement and medial questions, and that children who speak AAE are at an advantage in avoiding certain errors (partial movement) because of the dialect's characteristic marking of indirect questions via inversion in the lower clause. © 2010 Elsevier B.V.