How do 5-year-olds understand questions? Differences in languages across Europe

Uli Sauerland Kleanthes K. Grohmann Maria Teresa Guasti Darinka Anđelković Reili Argus Sharon Armon-Lotem Fabrizio Arosio Larisa Avram João Costa Ineta Dabašinskienė Kristine de López Daniela Gatt Helen Grech Ewa Haman Angeliek van Hout Gordana Hrzica Judith Kainhofer Laura Kamandulytė-Merfeldienė Sari Kunnari Melita Kovačević Jelena Kuvac Kraljević Katarzyna Lipowska Sandrine Mejias 1 Maša Popović Jurate Ruzaite Maja Savić Anca Sevcenco Spyridoula Varlokosta Marina Varnava Kazuko Yatsushiro
1 SCALab - Sciences Cognitives et Sciences Affectives (SCALab) - UMR 9193
Abstract : 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.
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https://hal.univ-lille.fr/hal-02476913
Contributeur : Lilloa Université de Lille <>
Soumis le : jeudi 13 février 2020 - 09:17:55
Dernière modification le : vendredi 14 février 2020 - 01:36:48

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UNIV-LILLE | SCALAB | CNRS

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Uli Sauerland, Kleanthes K. Grohmann, Maria Teresa Guasti, Darinka Anđelković, Reili Argus, et al.. How do 5-year-olds understand questions? Differences in languages across Europe. First Language, SAGE Publications, 2016, First Language, 36 (3), pp.169-202. ⟨10.1177/0142723716640236⟩. ⟨hal-02476913⟩

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