Syntactic Creativity Errors in Children's Wh-Questions

Abstract

Previous work has reported that children creatively make syntactic errors that are ungrammatical in their target language, but are grammatical in another language. One of the most well-known examples is medial wh-question errors in English-speaking children's wh-questions (e.g., What do you think who the cat chased? from Thornton, 1990). The evidence for this non-target-like structure in both production and comprehension has been taken to support the existence of innate, syntactic parameters that define all possible grammatical variation, which serve as a top-down constraint guiding children's language acquisition process. The present study reports new story-based production and comprehension experiments that challenge this interpretation. While we replicated previous observations of medial wh-question errors in children's sentence production (Experiment 1), we saw a reduction in evidence indicating that English-speaking children assign interpretations that conform to the medial wh-question pattern (Experiment 2). Crucially, we found no correlation between production and comprehension errors (Experiment 3). We suggest that these errors are the result of children's immature sentence production mechanisms rather than immature grammatical knowledge.