On the acquisition of WH-questions

Abstract

This paper is the account of a study carried out in 1990 in which we tried to gain further insight into the acquisition of subject and object wh-questions. We differentiated between two wh-words, who and what, for subject and object questions. The study consisted of a production and a comprehension task and was carried out with 11 children aged between 3;4 and 4;7 years. The results suggest that children find subject questions easier to produce and comprehend than object questions. In addition, the animate question pronoun who was used more often than the inanimate question pronoun what.