Development of Dutch children’s comprehension of subject and object wh-questions

Abstract

While Dutch welke 'which'-questions are structurally ambiguous, number agreement cues can disambiguate them. Despite such agreement cues, children misinterpret object questions as subject questions (Metz et al. 2010(Metz et al. , 2012Schouwenaars et al. 2014). We investigated if adding another cue, specifically, topicality in a discourse context, helps the interpretation of which-questions in two groups of Dutch children (5;5, n = 15 and 8;5, n = 21). Using a referent-selection task, we manipulated number on the verb and postverbal NP to create unambiguous wh-questions. Moreover, the questions were preceded by a discourse which established a topic, relating either to the wh-referent or the postverbal NP referent. Nevertheless, both 5-and 8-year-olds misinterpreted object questions as subject questions, ignoring the number and topicality cues to resolve the (local) ambiguity of which-questions. Our results confirm the effect of a subject-first bias in children's interpretation of wh-questions. We conclude that topicality, in combination with number agreement, is not strong enough to overrule this subject-first bias.

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

“…In this article, we do not report more detailed analyses of the data from specific languages involved for reasons of space. But some of these have already been completed by contributors to this article (CY: Varnava & Grohmann, 2014; NL: Metz, van Hout, & van der Lely, 2012; Metz, van Hout, & van der Lely, 2010; Schouwenaars, van Hout, & Hendriks, 2012; Strangmann, Slomp, & van Hout, 2014), and we hope that further analyses will be undertaken.…”