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Young children's acquisition of wh-questions: the role of structured input

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 March 2003

VIRGINIA VALIAN  and
LYMAN CASEY
VIRGINIA VALIAN
Affiliation:
Hunter College and CUNY Graduate Center
LYMAN CASEY
Affiliation:
Northwestern University
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Abstract

Two-year-olds learn language quickly but how they exploit adult input remains obscure. Twenty-nine children aged 2;6 to 3;2, divided into three treatment groups, participated in an intervention experiment consisting of four sessions 1 week apart. Pre- and post-intervention sessions were identical for all children: children heard a wh-question and attempted to repeat it; a ‘talking bear’ answered. That same format was used for the two intervention sessions for children in a quasicontrol condition (Group QC). Children receiving modelling (Group M) heard a question twice before repeating it; those receiving implicit correction (Group IC) heard a question, attempted to repeat it, and heard it again. All groups improved in supplying and inverting an auxiliary for target questions with trained auxiliaries. Only experimental children generalized to auxiliaries on which they had not been trained. Very little input, if concentrated but varied, and presented so that the child attends to it and attempts to parse it, is sufficient for the rapid extraction and generalization of syntactic regularities. Children can learn even more efficiently than has been thought.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 30 , Issue 1 , February 2003 , pp. 117 - 143
Copyright
© 2003 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

This research was supported by a grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (HD-24369). For their fine work, we thank the assistants and interns on the project: C. Sciglitano, S. Aubry, K. Browning, Z. Eisenberg, L. Feigenblum, M. Germans and A. Sklar. We warmly thank the children, parents, and day care and nursery school staff who so generously contributed their time and effort. J. J. Katz, M. C. Potter and anonymous readers gave us constructive, thoughtful and challenging comments, for which we are grateful. Portions of this paper were presented at the Society for Research in Child Development; the University of Massachusetts; the Cognitive Development Unit of the Medical Research Council, London; Oxford University; the Laboratoire de Psychologie Expérimentale of the Centre Nationale de Recherche Scientifique, Paris; and the University of Groningen; we thank those audiences for their questions and comments. We dedicate this paper to the memory of Jerrold J. Katz.