Keynote Address

We are happy to announce that this year's MSULC keynote speaker is UMD Linguistics PhD student Adam Liter!

His talk is titled: "Why do you think why kids produce medial wh-phrases: Grammar or performance?"

ABSTRACT:

English-acquiring children are known to sometimes produce sentences such as "what do you think what the girls are eating" in elicited production studies (e.g., Thornton 1990). Such productions, with an extra pronounced copy of the wh-phrase, are ungrammatical in the target adult grammar. This raises an interesting developmental question. Why do children sometimes produce such utterances? Notably, there are some adult grammars that in fact allow such sorts of sentences. Some languages exhibit wh-copying, allowing sentences such as (1).

(1) Wen glaubst du [wen sie getroffen hat]?

    who think   you who she met       has

    'Who do you think she met?'

And some languages exhibit partial wh-movement, allowing sentences such as (2).

(2) Was  glaubte Miró [welches Bild    Picasso gemalt  hatte]?

    what thought Miró  which   picture Picasso painted had

    'Which picture did Miró think Picasso had painted?'

Both (1) and (2) are similar to the sorts of non-adult-like questions that English-acquiring children sometimes produce, and several researchers have proposed developmental accounts wherein English-acquiring children temporarily land on the wrong grammar (e.g., Thornton 1990; McDaniel et al. 1995; de Villiers et al. 2011; Roeper & de Villiers 2011).

In this talk, however, we argue that English-acquiring children's production of utterances with medial wh-phrases is the result of developing inhibition control, an executive function. We show that the production of utterances with medial wh-phrases is predicted by independent measures of inhibition. Moreover, the production of utterances with medial wh-phrases is also predicted by asking a question with different argument structure than the intended sentence. If failure to ask a question with the intended argument structure indexes taxed executive function resources, this correlation is explained by a performance-based account of children's medial wh productions; it is not explained by any of the non-target grammar accounts.