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This study explores (mis)interpretation of biclausal wh-questions by French-speaking adults and children, aiming to investigate cross-linguistic differences in sentence revision mechanisms. Following previous work in Japanese the ambiguity of wh-questions was manipulated: In ambiguous questions, the fronted wh-phrase could be associated with the first, main-clause verb or the second, embeddedclause verb, while in garden-path questions, an inserted filled-gap prepositional phrase (PP) blocked main-clause attachment. Importantly, French differs from Japanese in that the filled gap arises after the first verb-that is, after the wh-phrase has been interpreted within the main clause. Two storybased comprehension experiments were conducted to probe the effect of word order on revision performance. Adults and children frequently provided main-clause interpretations of ambiguous questions. In filled-gap questions, children displayed relatively acute sensitivity to the filled-gap in wh-argument questions (Experiment 2), but not in wh-adjunct questions (Experiment 1); adults showed surprisingly low sensitivity to it, frequently misinterpreting adjunct and argument questions. Acceptability ratings (Experiment 3) showed that adults systematically prefer in situ questions over wh-fronting questions. We conclude that timing of the error signal influences revision, and that whereas French-speaking children prioritize syntactic cues, adults prioritize distributional information about the optionality of whfronting in French.

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One major controversy in the field of language development concerns the nature of children’s early grammatical knowledge. This paper focuses on the early representation of word order. It questions the validity of the results obtained with the Weird Word Order methodology (Akhtar,1999) inwhichchildrenare presented with un grammatical sentences. These results have previously been considered as major evidence for the constructivist,usage-based approach to word order development according to which young children initially encode word order as a verb-specific lexical property which only slowly develops into abstract knowledge at age 3 or 4 (e.g., Abbot-Smith et al., 2001; Matthews et al., 2005, 2007). The critical review presented here addresses various problems with the results and their interpretation. The discussion questions the relationship between theory and data as well asmethodological issues related to thesm all number of observations and the discarding of data not missing at random. It is argued that the data not only fail to support the constructivist account, but they actually bring evidence for the alternative hypothesis according to which children, from early on, represent word order abstractly

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