WH-words are not uniform in their syntactic behaviors. Adjunct WH-words such as HOW and WHY are said to be more restricted in their distribution than argument WH-words such as WHO and WHAT. It is observed, however, that HOW in some East Asian languages behaves more like argument WH-words and does not display ECP effects. In this paper, I try to account for the HOW vs. WHY difference in Korean. ...

Compared to typically developing children, children with autism (ASD) show delayed production of wh-questions. It is currently controversial the degree to which such deficits derive from social-pragmatic requirements and/or because these are complex grammatical structures. The current study employed the intermodal preferential looking (IPL) paradigm, which reduces social-pragmatic demands. The ...

This study investigated different accounts of children's acquisition of non-subject wh-questions. Questions using each of 4 wh-words (what, who, how and why), and 3 auxiliaries (BE, DO and CAN) in 3sg and 3pl form were elicited from 28 children aged 3;6-4;6. Rates of noninversion error (Who she is hitting?) were found not to differ by wh-word, auxiliary or number alone, but by lexical auxiliary...

Boškovi (1997a), (1997b), (in press a), (in press b) showed that Superiority effects (cf. Chomsky (1973)) may be taken as a diagnostic for wh-movement in multiple whquestions, that is, movement of a wh-phrase to Spec-CP, if one adopts the minimalist framework of Chomsky (1995b). In this framework, movement is subject to derivational economy, realized in conditions such as Minimal Link (MLC). In...

Using a self-paced reading task, the present study investigates how highly proficient second language (L2) speakers of German with English as their native language process unambiguous wh-subject-extractions and wh-object-extractions in German. Previous monolingual research has shown that English and German exhibit different processing preferences for the type of wh-question under investigation,...

This paper proposes a structural analysis of two types of wh-question formation in the Austronesian languages Seediq and Tagalog. Wh-questions formed on arguments are pseudo-cleft constructions; the wh-word functions as a predicate taking the rest of the clause, in the form of a headless relative, as its subject. The restriction that argument wh-questions can only be formed on absolutives is ac...

Using the self-paced reading paradigm, the present study examines whether highly proficient second language (L2) speakers of German (English first language) use case-marking information during the on-line comprehension of unambiguous wh-extractions, even when task demands do not draw explicit attention to this morphosyntactic feature in German. Results support previous findings, in that both th...

This study attempted to replicate the unusual wh question comprehension pattern of Hickok and Avrutin's (1996) subjects who showed an expected subject/object extraction asymmetry for which NP questions, but not for who questions. We also examined comprehension of what and which one questions, which are similar to who and which NP questions, respectively, and we examined passivized wh questions ...

Previous studies on the intonation of wh-in-situ questions in French have focused mainly on the utterance final movement and ignored the prosodic properties of the region preceding the wh-constituent. Yet, these latter properties are particularly interesting from a processing perspective, as they may help the listener anticipate a question before the wh-word is reached, which might facilitate p...