Answering hard questions: Wh -movement across dialects and disorder

摘要: A large-scale study of complex wh-questions with 1,000 subjects aged 4–9 years is reported. The subjects' dialects were Mainstream American English or African English, and approximately one-third language impaired. examined when children permit long distance wh-movement, they respect a variety syntactic barriers to movement. Thirteen different structures compared, the results suggest that typically developing disordered at all ages studied are capable long-distance movement obedience abstract barriers. In no case was dialect significant factor in children's linguistic performance on these tasks.