The Production of non-adult questions and relative clauses in child English: the role of executive functions
Principal Investigator: Prof. Elaine Grolla, PhD
Funding: FAPESP (Brazil): July/2026 - July/2027
Project being developed at the University of Toronto, Canada, host: Ana Teresa Pérez-Leroux, PhD
Research in language acquisition should consider not only purely linguistic developmental aspects, but also the influence that aspects of cognitive development exert on a child's performance. This type of research is necessary to accurately characterize which non-adult behaviors of children are due to linguistic maturation and which are due to the maturation of other aspects of cognition. In this project, to be carried out with children acquiring English as their native language, the focus is on two constructions in which non-adult productions are recurrently found: negative questions and relative clauses. In elicited production tasks, questions with a reduplicated auxiliary verb are produced (What did Smurf didn't move?). Such questions, called Aux-doubling in the literature, are impossible in adult English. In the case of relative clauses, there is the production of resumptive elements, something ungrammatical in the adult language (I choose the boy that the grandma kissed the boy). In this project, we propose to investigate these structures in order to contrast two hypotheses present in the literature that attempt to explain cases of reduplication as having as an underlying cause (i) inhibitory control (cf. Liter et al) or (ii) working memory (cf. Lutken et al). To explore these hypotheses, preschool-aged children acquiring English will be tested in a battery of experiments. We will compare the behavior of children who produce such structures and those who do not in tests of inhibitory control and working memory, in order to verify the possible association between behavior in the linguistic tests and in the tests measuring executive functions. In this innovative study, we seek to relate some aspects of linguistic development to the 3rd factor (Chomsky (2005)), following the trend of more recent studies in the area of ¿¿language acquisition, in an effort to view acquisition facts as part of the development not only of language, but of cognition more broadly.