Preschoolers' production of tag questions and adherence to the polarity-contrast principle.
In this study children's ability to repeat either positive- or negative-polarity tag questions was examined. An elicited imitation task (Brown, Fraser, & Bellugi, 1963; Slobin & Welsh, 1973) was used to determine whether the patterns of repetition by children with lower-level language skills differ from the patterns of repetition by children with normal language skills. It was also asked whether children always adhere to the polarity-contrast principle in their production of tag questions, as suggested by Berninger and Garvey (1982). Adherence to the polarity-contrast principle was greater for the higher-level children than the lower-level children, but very few qualitative differences in the children's responses were found. Both sets of children violated the polarity-contrast principles at times and frequently repeated contrasting tag questions as matching tag questions. This finding clearly counters Berninger and Garvey's claim that preschool children always adhere to the polarity-contrast principle and corresponds to the spontaneous speech data of Richards (1988) and Todd (1982). Preschool children, it appears, have more than has been assumed to learn about the structure and function of English tag questions.
Weeks
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Language Project Preschool, Woodlawn Elementary School, Lawrence, Kansas.
D002663:Child Language; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007804:Language Development; D008297:Male; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D012660:Semantics; D014705:Verbal Behavior