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

CNRS-FRE 2929, Université Paris Descartes, Institut de Psychologie

Nelleke Strik

CNRS- UMR 7023, Université Paris 8 and LPP, CNRS-FRE 2929, nellekestrik{at}gmail.com

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.

Key Words: derivational complexity • language acquisition • scope-marking strategies • syntax • wh-interrogatives

Language and Speech, Vol. 51, No. 1-2, 101-132 (2008)
DOI: 10.1177/00238309080510010701


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