Production of Wh-Questions in Child Brazilian Portuguese: Movement and Intervention
Principal Investigator: Prof. Elaine Grolla, PhD
Funding: CNPq Productivity Grant 2024–2027
In this project, we propose to investigate two aspects of child development that are widely discussed and explored in the international literature, which have highlighted difficulties experienced by children acquiring a variety of languages regarding questions: the optionality of syntactic movement and the presence of intervening elements. The literature on the acquisition of wh-questions in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) has systematically shown that children produce wh-in situ at very low rates—much lower than what is found in adult speech. Furthermore, studies in BP investigating intervention effects observed that children exhibit lower comprehension rates of structures involving intervention and avoid this configuration in production studies. Overall, research in BP on intervention effects has focused on the production of relative clauses and the comprehension of relative clauses and object wh-questions. Research specifically targeting the production of object wh-questions in contrast with subject wh-questions has not yet been conducted. This is the gap the present research seeks to fill.
By testing preschool-aged children on wh-questions—manipulating the syntactic function of the wh-element (subject vs. object) and the feature specification of the wh-element (wh [+NP] vs. wh [–NP])—we will be able to observe the impact of structures containing intervening elements on children's production. This will allow us to address the following question: when prompted to produce wh-questions involving an intervention configuration, will children produce more economically efficient strategies, such as wh-in situ questions, even if this is not a strategy they spontaneously resort to? This investigation touches on issues of computational economy and language processing, potentially shedding light on the processing difficulties imposed by intervention configurations and how this may influence child productions, leading them to produce structures known to be disfavored in their spontaneous speech.