When Is Recursion Easier for Children?

Abstract

Recursion is the heart of generative grammar. Our experiments with preschool children suggest that that recursive cyclic movement in wh-chains is available to 4-yr-olds. More surprisingly, extraction of wh-adjunct questions from doubly-embedded complements, i.e. three clauses, seems simpler for children than extraction from a single embedded clause. In comprehension experiments, children were more likely to resist answering the recursive questions with a response that only related the wh-trace to the last verb. We attribute this to the semantic uniformity imposed by cyclic wh-movement. Theoretical work has not yet answered satisfactorily the question of which options from the expanded left periphery might be available at each CP, but this might hold the clue for explaining the results in child language acquisition.