Comprehension of exhaustive wh-questions of typically developing preschool children

Abstract

Wh-questions are among the most important and the most frequent types of utterance, which presumably reflects the role of questions in everyday life in gathering various types of information. There is a limited body of research on the exhaustivity comprehension in multiple wh-questions in children (such as, for example, Who drives what, Who gives something to whom?). However, previous results suggest that exhaustivity emerges at the age of four, although there is considerable variability depending on the language. In this paper two aims were proposed: first, to explore when typically developing Serbian speaking monolingual children comprehend exhaustivity property within multiple wh-questions, and, second, cognitive relevancy of structural complexity of multiple wh-questions. 40 typically developing Serbian speaking monolingual children subdivided in three age groups from 3,6 - 7,1 years participated in this study. The question-after-picture test, which consists of 20 tasks with pre-vocabulary check, was used. The tasks were classified according to complexity index into paired and triple wh-questions. Results indicate that children acquire comprehension of exhaustive wh-questions gradually, first in paired wh-questions and then in triple wh-questions. The research provides data on language development, and also offers guidelines for diagnostic and clinical work with children with specific language impairment.