Language development

Encyclopedia of Psychology, Apr 06, 2001 by Jill De Villiers, Ph.D.

and draw the conclusion that to make a question, you take the third word and move it to the front. Of course, that hypothesis would soon be disconfirmed by a pair such as:

not: Man the tall will come?

More likely, the child might form the rule "move the first word like can, will, is, etc. up to the front," which would fit all of the above and hundreds of other such sentences. However, that is not a structure-dependent rule, because it makes no reference to the grammatical role that word plays in the sentence. The only disconfirmation would come from the occasions when a subject relative clause appears before the auxiliary:

but our earlier, structure-independent rule would produce:

The child who formulated the almost-adequate rule would fail in such circumstances, but no child has been observed to make the mistake. Hence even from the inadequate data that children receive, they formulate a complex, structure-dependent rule.

Wh-questions appear among the child's first utterances, often in a routine form such as "Whazzat?" The forms are routines because they are invariant in form, but more varied productions are not slow to emerge in children's grammar. The first, stereotyped forms may be tied to particular functions or contexts, but genuine interrogatives are varied not only in form but in use.

Just as in yes/no questions, the auxiliary must be in front of the subject noun phrase in a Wh-question, and children seem to have more difficulty with auxiliary-inversion in Wh-questions than in yes/no questions. At the same time children can say:

they might say:

failing to invert the auxiliary in the Wh-question.

What else does the child have to learn in Wh-questions? One factor concerns the link between the Wh-word and the "missing constituent." Certain of the Wh-words enter children's speech earlier than others, and there is some consistency across studies in that order: What, who, and where tend to emerge before why and how, with when coming later. Some have explained the order in terms of semantics, or rather concreteness, of the ideas contained in these words, since when and how depend upon cognitive developments of time and causality whereas what and who do not. The question why seems to be late for this reason: it is only through discourse that a child can determine the meaning of why, which may be the reason some young children ask it endlessly. It is also a question that rarely elicits a one-word answer, so it may be a way to keep the conversation going when you can't say much yourself yet!

A feature that is markedly evident in young children is their creativity with language. Children, like adults, continually produce sentences they have not heard before, and one can more easily recognize that novelty in children because sometimes the ideas are rather strange. For example, after hearing many "tag questions" such as "That's nice, isn't it?" and "You're a good girl, aren't you?" and "You can open that, can't you?" a three-year-old figured out how to make her own tags, and used the rules to say, "Goosebumps are hairy legs, aren't they?" and "He's a punk rocker, isn't he?," which were definitely not sentences she had heard. In addition, the creative use is revealed because children overextend rules to exceptional cases. For example, a child may say "My porridge is getting middle-sizeder" as he struggles through a huge bowl of oatmeal. It can also occur because children do not yet have the vocabulary for certain subtleties of expression. But the way that children fill these "lexical gaps" uses the same principles as adults who do the same thing. For example, an adult might use an "innovative verb" such as "I weekended in New York," and a child might similarly say, "I broomed her!" after pursuing a sibling with a broom. However, a child who said "You have to scale it first" as she put a bag on a scale was creating an innovation for which there is already an existing word-namely, weigh. The creativity of children's linguistic innovations has been emphasized because it demonstrates that children do not just imitate what they hear, but extract general rules and principles that allow them to form new expressions.