Children's Use of the Wh Question Modal Auxiliary Placement Rule.

Abstract Three studies assessed children's knowledge of the wh question modal auxiliary placement rule by asking the children to imitate (and in Study 3 judge the correctness of) grammatical and ungrammatical model wh questions. The results suggest that children learn to apply this rule to questions beginning with one or two wh words, then to questions beginning with another wh word, and so on, rather than to all relevant question types simultaneously, indicating that the acquisition of this syntactic rule is initially relatively specific. However, the results also demonstrate that children overgeneralize the wh question modal auxiliary placement rule to how come questions, indicating that during the course of development this initially specific rule becomes generally productive. The theoretical implications of this specific-to-general developmental pattern are discussed.

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