How do 5-year-olds understand questions? Differences in languages across Europe
Date
2016Author
Sauerland, Uli
Guasti, Maria Teresa
Anđelković, Darinka
Argus, Reili
Armon-Lotem, Sharon
Arosio, Fabrizio
Avram, Larisa
Costa, João
Dabasinskiene, Ineta
De Lopez, Kristine Jensen
Gatt, Daniela
Grech, Helen
Haman, Ewa
Van Hout, Angeliek
Hrzica, Gordana
Kainhofer, Judith
Kamandulytė-Merfeldienė, Laura
Kunnari, Sari
Kovačević, Melita
Kuvac Kraljevic, Jelena
Lipowska, Katarzyna
Mejias, Sandrine
Popović, Maša
Ruzaite, Jurate
Savic, Maja
Sevcenco, Anca
Varlokosta, Spyridoula
Varnava, Marina
Yatsushiro, Kazuko
ISSN
0142-7237Source
First Language First LanguageVolume
36Pages
169-202Google Scholar check
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Show full item recordAbstract
The comprehension of constituent questions is an important topic for language acquisition research and for applications in the diagnosis of language impairment. This article presents the results of a study investigating the comprehension of different types of questions by 5-year-old, typically developing children across 19 European countries, 18 different languages, and 7 language (sub-)families. The study investigated the effects of two factors on question formation: (a) whether the question contains a simple interrogative word like ‘who’ or a complex one like ‘which princess’, and (b) whether the question word was related to the sentential subject or object position of the verb. The findings show that there is considerable variation among languages, but the two factors mentioned consistently affect children’s performance. The cross-linguistic variation shows that three linguistic factors facilitate children’s understanding of questions: having overt case morphology, having a single lexical item for both ‘who’ and ‘which’, and the use of synthetic verbal forms.