Role of inversion in children's question development.
Current developmental descriptions of children's Wh-question production are contradictory. One account posits a stage in which the auxiliary verb and subject noun phrase are uninverted, whereas another view offers no empirical support for such a stage. The purpose of the present investigation was to test these divergent developmental descriptions by analyzing children's spontaneously produced questions. Six children at each of three linguistic stages, defined by mean utterance length in morphemes and ranging from 2.50 to 3.99, were selected for study. The children were between 25 and 47 months of age and evidenced no speech, language, or hearing disorders. Although the results replicated the proposed semantic ordering of question types, a stage characterized by uninverted forms was not supported.
D002675:Child, Preschool; D006801:Humans; D007804:Language Development; D012660:Semantics; D013068:Speech Production Measurement