Doctoral Dissertation Research: Cross-Linguistic Investigations of Syntactic Creativity Errors in Children's Wh-questions

Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore MD

Investigators

Abstract

Children show remarkable aptitude for learning language and have mastered much of the grammar of their language by age four. This remarkable skill has led to the hypothesis that children come to this task with an innate ability to learn certain types of grammatical patterns, namely those manifested in the languages of the world. Through exposure, they learn which patterns are relevant to their language. For example, children learning English initially produce a type of complex questions not grammatical in English, but resembling grammatical German questions. Over time, they learn this pattern is not English and no longer use it. An alternative explanation for these errors is that limited general cognitive capacities, specifically memory, attention, and sentence planning result in productions which only superficially resemble German questions. The goal of the project is to tease apart these possible explanations through controlled experimentation comparing elicited questions and answers by English speaking children and by German speaking children. The two hypotheses predict different error types. If the errors are the result of an innate predisposition, German speaking children should produce some questions resembling English. If the errors are the result of limited cognitive abilities, children learning each language should produce questions which are not consistent with such a predisposition. This research holds the potential to be used as a clinical diagnostic for investigating children's linguistic and cognitive development. The research comprises novel experiments designed to test production and comprehension of multiclausal questions. Children between the ages of four and six will be given tests designed to assess their attention, working memory, and sentence planning abilities. By comparing performance of English and German speaking children, this project will further illuminate the role of input in language learning and provide a baseline for comparison for English-speaking children. Novel contributions include furthering the use and integration of psycholinguistic methodologies into linguistic work as well as investigating German children's as yet unstudied acquisition of this complex syntactic phenomenon. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.