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How do 5-year-olds understand questions? Differences in languages across Europe

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Sauerland, Uli [ARC Center of Excellence in Cognition and Its Disorders] Grohmann, Kleanthes K. [University of Cyprus] Guasti, Maria Teresa [University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy] Anđelković, Darinka [University of Belgrade, Serbia] Argus, Reili [Tallinn University, Estonia] Mejias Vanslype, Sandrine [UCL] Yatsushiro, Kazuko [Center for General Linguistics, Germany]

The comprehension of constituent questions is an important topic for language acquisition research and for applications in the diagnosis of language impairment. This article presents the results of a study investigating the comprehension of different types of questions by 5-year-old, typically developing children across 19 European countries, 18 different languages, and 7 language (sub-)families. The study investigated the effects of two factors on question formation: (a) whether the question contains a simple interrogative word like 'who' or a complex one like 'which princess', and (b) whether the question word was related to the sentential subject or object position of the verb. The findings show that there is considerable variation among languages, but the two factors mentioned consistently affect children's performance. The cross-linguistic variation shows that three linguistic factors facilitate children's understanding of questions: having overt case morphology, having a single lexical item for both 'who' and 'which', and the use of synthetic verbal forms.

Document type Article de périodique (Journal article) – Synthèse de littérature
Publication date 2016
Language Anglais
Journal information "First Language" - Vol. 36, no.3, p. 169-202 (2016)
Publisher SAGE Publications
issn 0142-7237
e-issn 1740-2344
Publication status Publié
Affiliation UCL - SSH/ILC - Institut Langage et Communication
Keywords Linguistics and Language ; Education ; Language and Linguistics
Links
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Bibliographic reference Sauerland, Uli ; Grohmann, Kleanthes K. ; Guasti, Maria Teresa ; Anđelković, Darinka ; Argus, Reili ; et. al. How do 5-year-olds understand questions? Differences in languages across Europe. In: First Language, Vol. 36, no.3, p. 169-202 (2016)
Permanent URL http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/198117