Rhetorical question comprehension by Italian–German bilingual children

This study investigates for the first time comprehension of rhetorical questions (RhQs) in bilingual children. RhQs are non-canonical questions, as they not used to request information, but express speaker’s belief that answer is already obvious. special pragmatic meaning often arises by means specific prosodic and lexical-syntactic cues. Being childhood learners, children have acquire concept rhetoricity, being bilinguals, further need different cues marking their two languages. We tested 85 (aged 6–9 years) with Italian heritage language (HL) German majority (ML) both languages, using a forced-choice task. Our results show RhQ improves age Bilingual able exploit syntactic comprehend ML HL slight advantage ML. could be either an effect experiments languages or higher proficiency In addition, our point later acquisition cues, which has implications non-canonicity general.