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Brief Research Reports
Children's production of errors in wh-questions provides an interesting test case for theoretical approaches to language acquisition and syntactic development. Construction-based accounts argue that children formulate questions using lexically specific frames (e.g. What is [THING] [PROCESS]? or What does [THING] [PROCESS]?) and that error patterns reflect the item-specific nature of children's wh-questions (Ambridge, Theakston, Lieven & Tomasello, 2006). Based on data from Norwegian, a Germanic V2 language, Westergaard (2009) argued that some non-target consistent forms such as omission of verbs or wh-words are incompatible with constructivist accounts. According to Westergaard's account, omission errors disconfirm the constructivists' assumption that children primarily rely on frequent input patterns (specific wh-word+verb frames) when formulating interrogatives.
In the current study, we present data from German children's production of wh-questions to investigate whether wh-omission errors occur in lexically specific frames and whether input properties such as prosodic patterns or discourse givenness may influence their production.
In reports of German-learning children's wh-questions it has been found that children omit the utterance initial wh-word especially during early stages of development (Clahsen, Kursawe & Penke, 1995; Tracy, 1994). Interestingly, wh-word omission has also been reported to occur frequently in other Germanic V2 languages such as Dutch (Van Kampen, 1997), Swedish (Santelmann, 2004) and Norwegian (Westergaard, 2009), but, to our knowledge, has not been reported systematically for English. Other examples of errors in German children's early wh-questions include verb doubling (Penner, 1994), subject omission (Hamann, Penner & Lindner, 1998), verb omission (Steinkrauss, 2009) and non-inversion errors (Wode, 1975).
However, overall little is known about the frequency with which German children produce these different types of errors in formulating questions. Therefore, we performed a detailed longitudinal analysis of the different types and rates of errors in German children's wh-questions. Our hypothesis was that German children would show high error rates of verb omission and omission of wh-words, as this seems to be the most common error in wh-questions across typologically similar languages.
The second objective of the current study concerned the factors that might explain wh-omission errors. We wanted to know whether wh-omission occurs in lexically specific frames and whether input...