TY - GEN A1 - Omane, Paul Okyere A1 - Höhle, Barbara T1 - Acquiring Syntactic Variability: The Production of Wh-Questions in Children and Adults Speaking Akan T2 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe N2 - This paper investigates the predictions of the Derivational Complexity Hypothesis by studying the acquisition of wh-questions in 4- and 5-year-old Akan-speaking children in an experimental approach using an elicited production and an elicited imitation task. Akan has two types of wh-question structures (wh-in-situ and wh-ex-situ questions), which allows an investigation of children’s acquisition of these two question structures and their preferences for one or the other. Our results show that adults prefer to use wh-ex-situ questions over wh-in-situ questions. The results from the children show that both age groups have the two question structures in their linguistic repertoire. However, they differ in their preferences in usage in the elicited production task: while the 5-year-olds preferred the wh-in-situ structure over the wh-ex-situ structure, the 4-year-olds showed a selective preference for the wh-in-situ structure in who-questions. These findings suggest a developmental change in wh-question preferences in Akan-learning children between 4 and 5 years of age with a so far unobserved u-shaped developmental pattern. In the elicited imitation task, all groups showed a strong tendency to maintain the structure of in-situ and ex-situ questions in repeating grammatical questions. When repairing ungrammatical ex-situ questions, structural changes to grammatical in-situ questions were hardly observed but the insertion of missing morphemes while keeping the ex-situ structure. Together, our findings provide only partial support for the Derivational Complexity Hypothesis. T3 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe - 738 KW - Akan KW - wh-questions KW - wh-in-situ KW - wh-ex-situ KW - derivational complexity KW - language acquisition Y1 - 2022 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-536867 SN - 1866-8364 SP - 1 EP - 15 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Arslan, Seçkin A1 - Gür, Eren A1 - Felser, Claudia T1 - Predicting the sources of impaired wh-question comprehension in non-fluent aphasia BT - a cross-linguistic machine learning study on Turkish and German T2 - Postprints der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe N2 - This study investigates the comprehension of wh-questions in individuals with aphasia (IWA) speaking Turkish, a non-wh-movement language, and German, a wh-movement language. We examined six German-speaking and 11 Turkish-speaking IWA using picture-pointing tasks. Findings from our experiments show that the Turkish IWA responded more accurately to both object who and object which questions than to subject questions, while the German IWA performed better for subject which questions than in all other conditions. Using random forest models, a machine learning technique used in tree-structured classification, on the individual data revealed that both the Turkish and German IWA’s response accuracy is largely predicted by the presence of overt and unambiguous case marking. We discuss our results with regard to different theoretical approaches to the comprehension of wh-questions in aphasia. T3 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe - 464 KW - Non-fluent aphasia KW - random forest algorithm KW - sentence comprehension KW - wh-in-situ KW - wh-questions KW - wh-movement Y1 - 2018 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-412717 IS - 464 ER - TY - THES A1 - Herrmann, Heike T1 - Zum Erwerb syntaktischer Aspekte von positiven und negativen W-Fragen im unauffälligen und auffälligen Spracherwerb des Deutschen T1 - Syntactic acquisition of positive and negative wh-questions in German infants with typical and atypical language development N2 - Der W-Fragen-Erwerb stellt einen Teilbereich der kindlichen Syntaxentwicklung dar, die sich maßgeblich innerhalb der ersten drei Lebensjahre eines Kindes vollzieht. Eine wesentliche Rolle spielen dabei zwei Bewegungsoperationen, die sich auf die Position des Interrogativpronomens an die erste Stelle der W-Frage sowie die Position des Verbs an die zweite Stelle beziehen. In drei Studien wurde einerseits untersucht, ob deutschsprachige Kinder, die noch keine W-Fragen produzieren können, in der Lage sind, grammatische von ungrammatischen W-Fragen zu unterscheiden und andererseits, welche Leistungen sprachunauffällige und sprachauffällige deutschsprachige Kinder beim Verstehen und Korrigieren unterschiedlich komplexer W-Fragen (positive und negative W-Fragen) zeigen. Die Ergebnisse deuten auf ein frühes syntaktisches Wissen über W-Fragen im Spracherwerb hin und stützen damit die Annahme einer Kontinuität der kindlichen Grammatik zur Standardsprache. Auch scheinen sprachauffällige Kinder sich beim Erwerb von W-Fragen nicht qualitativ von sprachgesunden Kindern zu unterscheiden, sondern W-Fragen lediglich später korrekt umzusetzen. In beiden Populationen konnte ein syntaktischer Ökonomieeffekt beobachtet werden, der für eine spätere Umsetzung der Verbbewegung im Vergleich zur Bewegung des W-Elementes spricht. N2 - Wh-questions represent one important step in the acquisition of children's syntax which generally takes place within the first three years. Two syntactic operations which are related to the position of the pronoun and the position of the verb play an essential role in this process. In three studies it was examined if children acquiring German could distinguish grammatical and non-grammatical wh-questions before being able to produce wh-questions themselves. Furthermore children with typical and atypical language acquisition were compared in their ability to comprehend and correct wh-questions of different complexity (positive and negative wh-questions). The results indicate an early syntactic knowledge about wh-questions in language acquisition and support the hypothesis of continuity between children's and adults speech. Children with typical and atypical language acquisition do not show any qualitative differences in their way to acquire wh-questions. Much rather the time point of acquisition is delayed. An effect of syntactic economy was found in both populations. Children seem to realize syntactic violations against the movement of the wh-element earlier than those against the movement of the verb. T3 - Spektrum Patholinguistik - Schriften - 8 KW - Spracherwerb KW - Syntax KW - W-Fragen KW - Negation KW - Ökonomieprinzipien (MP) KW - language acquisition KW - syntax KW - wh-questions KW - negation KW - syntactic economy (MP) Y1 - 2013 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-70606 SN - 978-3-86956-293-3 SN - 1869-3830 SN - 1869-3822 PB - Universitätsverlag Potsdam CY - Potsdam ER -