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Error patterns in young German children's wh-questions*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 May 2012

DANIEL SCHMERSE ,
ELENA LIEVEN  and
MICHAEL TOMASELLO
DANIEL SCHMERSE
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany
ELENA LIEVEN
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany
MICHAEL TOMASELLO
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany
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Abstract

In this article we report two studies: a detailed longitudinal analysis of errors in wh-questions from six German-learning children (age 2 ; 0–3 ; 0) and an analysis of the prosodic characteristics of wh-questions in German child-directed speech. The results of the first study demonstrate that German-learning children frequently omit the initial wh-word. A lexical analysis of wh-less questions revealed that children are more likely to omit the wh-word was (‘what’) than other wh-words (e.g. wo ‘where’). In the second study, we performed an acoustic analysis of sixty wh-questions that one mother produced during her child's third year of life. The results show that the wh-word was is much less likely to be accented than the wh-word wo, indicating a relationship between children's omission of wh-words and the stress patterns associated with wh-questions. The findings are discussed in the light of discourse–pragmatic and metrical accounts of omission errors.

Type
Brief Research Reports
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 40 , Issue 3 , June 2013 , pp. 656 - 671
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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Footnotes

[*]

Address for correspondence: Daniel Schmerse, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology – Developmental and Comparative Psychology, Deutscher Platz 6 Leipzig 04103, Germany. e-mail: daniel_schmerse@eva.mpg.de

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