Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

Production of subject and object who-questions

by school-aged Italian-speaking children and adults

Giorgia Del Puppo, Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia

Young Italian-speaking children show a subject-object asymmetry for wh V DP who-questions in elicited production (Guasti et al. 2012), whereby object who-questions containing a plural verb agreeing with a plural postverbal subject DP are preferably realized with a left-dislocated subject or with a null subject; on the other hand, subject who-questions containing a singular verb and a plural postverbal object DP are produced at a much higher rate.

We carried out a similar elicited production experiment with older Italian-speaking children (6-10 year-old) and Italian-speaking adults; differently from Guasti et al. (2012), we elicited potentially ambiguous who V DP questions, i.e. questions where a singular verb agrees either with the wh-element (subject-extracted question) or with a singular postverbal DP (object-extracted question).

The findings of the two experiments are compared and discussed.

Moreover, the prosodic properties of the (ambiguous?) interrogative sentences produced by adult participants in our task are analyzed.

References

Guasti M. T., Branchini C., Arosio F. (2012), “Interference in the production of Italian subject and object wh-questions”, Applied Psycholinguistics 33, pp. 185-223.