Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

Asymmetries in Romanian children’s comprehension of wh-dependencies

Anamaria Bentea - Université de Genève

Previous research on children’s comprehension of wh-questions shows that subject questions are easier to comprehend than object questions and object who-questions yield better accuracy than object which-questions (Avrutin 2000, Friedmann et al. 2009, a.o.). The featural intervention account (Friedmann et al. 2009, Belletti et al. 2012) links children’s difficulties to the presence of intervention effects which arise when moving a wh-element containing a lexical restriction (a [+NP] feature) across a subject sharing a similar feature. In this talk I will present data from a study on the comprehension of subject and object who and which-questions by Romanian children that aimed to investigate whether (i) the presence of case-marking in object wh-questions and (ii) the absence of an overt [+NP] feature on the moved element in which-questions have the potential to modulate comprehension. The findings reveal two asymmetries in Romanian children’s comprehension of wh-dependencies: (i) a subject-object difference for which-questions, while no such difference is present in who-questions; (ii) an asymmetry in performance with object who- and object which-dependencies, irrespective of the presence or absence of an overt [+NP] in which-questions. I will discuss these findings in terms of the featural intervention account and show that they impact the characterization of features affecting the computation of intervention in child grammar.