The paper provides a semantic analysis of intervention effects in wh-questions. The interpretation component of the grammar derives uninterpretability, hence ungrammaticality, of the intervention data. In the system of compositional interpretation that I suggest, wh-phrases play the same role as focused phrases, introducing alternatives into the computation. Unlike focus, wh-phrases make no ord...

Children with developmental disabilities often converse less frequently than their developmentally matched peers. This low conversational participation can cause problems for the children's future language and discourse development. The purpose of this experimental study was to test the hypothesis that adult topic-continuing wh-questions would elicit topic continuations in children with relativ...

This paper discusses different approaches to language acquisition in relation to children's acquisition of word order in wh-questions in English and Norwegian. While generative models assert that children set major word order parameters and thus acquire a rule of subject-auxiliary inversion or generalized verb second (V2) at an early stage, some constructivist work argues that English-speaking ...

This study explores whether the generativist account, specifically integration theory, could explain children’s percentage of errors in questions general and it also applies to yes-no non-subject wh-question. The current adopts a corpus-based method compare 2-to-3-year-old percentages (and wh-question separately) including auxiliary DO HAVE. results show that rate is higher than HAVE, which app...

relation to children's acquisition of word order in wh-questions in English and Norwegian. While generative models assert that children set major word order parameters and thus acquire a rule of subject-auxiliary inversion or generalized verb second (V2) at an early stage, some constructivist work argues that English-speaking children are simply reproducing frequent wh-word + auxiliary combinat...

This paper discusses an item-based and a rule-based model of language acquisition in relation to children's acquisition of word order in wh-questions in English and Norwegian. Constructivist work argues that English-speaking children are sensitive to wh-word + auxiliary combinations in the input, while generative work asserts that children acquire a rule of subject-auxiliary inversion or genera...

Both English and Spanish exhibit an inversion effect in wh-questions: a verbal element must appear to the left of the subject. Analyses differ, however, as to whether this effect is due to similar syntactic mechanisms in the two languages or not. The phenomenon of judgment satiation, in which certain unacceptable sentence types improve upon repeated exposure, is used here to provide new evidenc...