How Languages are Learned 4th edition. Nina Spada

yet vary these forms for different persons or tenses.

      I can’t do it. He don’t want it.

       Stage 4

      Children begin to attach the negative element to the correct form of auxiliary verbs such as ‘do’ and ‘be’.

      You didn’t have supper. She doesn’t want it.

      Even though their language system is by now quite complex, they may still have difficulty with some other features related to negatives.

      I don’t have no more candies.

      Questions

      The challenge of learning complex language systems is also illustrated in the developmental stages through which children learn to ask questions.

      There is a remarkable consistency in the way children learn to form questions in English. For one thing, there is a predictable order in which the ‘wh- words’ emerge (Bloom 1991). ‘What’ is generally the first wh- question word to be used. It is often learned as part of a chunk (‘Whassat?’) and it is some time before the child learns that there are variations of the form, such as ‘What is that?’ and ‘What are these?’.

      ‘Where’ and ‘who’ emerge very soon. Identifying and locating people and objects are within the child’s understanding of the world. Furthermore, adults tend to ask children just these types of questions in the early days of language learning, for example, ‘Where’s Mommy?’ or ‘Who’s that?’

      ‘Why’ emerges around the end of the second year and becomes a favourite for the next year or two. Children seem to ask an endless number of questions beginning with ‘why’, having discovered how effectively this little word gets adults to engage in conversation, for example, ‘Why that lady has blue hair?’

      Finally, when the child has a better understanding of manner and time, ‘how’ and ‘when’ emerge. In contrast to ‘what’, ‘where’, and ‘who’ questions, children sometimes ask the more cognitively difficult ‘why’, ‘when’, and ‘how’ questions without understanding the answers they get, as the following conversation with a four-year-old clearly shows.

      The ability to use these question words is at least partly tied to children’s cognitive development. It is also predicted in part by the questions children are asked and the linguistic complexity of questions with different wh- words. Thus it does not seem surprising that there is consistency in the sequence of their acquisition. Perhaps more surprising is the consistency in the acquisition of word order in questions. This development is not based on learning new meanings, but rather on learning different linguistic patterns to express meanings that are already understood.

       Stage 1

      Children’s earliest questions are single words or simple two- or three-word sentences with rising intonation:

      Cookie? Mommy book?

      At the same time, they may produce some correct questions – correct because they have been learned as chunks:

      Where’s Daddy? What’s that?

       Stage 2

      As they begin to ask more new questions, children use the word order of the declarative sentence, with rising intonation.

      You like this? I have some?

      They continue to produce the correct chunk-learned forms such as ‘What’s that?’ alongside their own created questions.

       Stage 3

      Gradually, children notice that the structure of questions is different and begin to produce questions such as:

      Can I go?

      Are you happy?

      Although some questions at this stage match the adult pattern, they may be right for the wrong reason. To describe this, we need to see the pattern from the child’s perspective rather than from the perspective of the adult grammar. We call this stage ‘fronting’ because the child’s rule seems to be that questions are formed by putting something (a verb or question word) at the ‘front’ of a sentence, leaving the rest of the sentence in its statement form.

      Is the teddy is tired? Do I can have a cookie?

      Why you don’t have one? Why you catched it?

       Stage 4

      At Stage 4, some questions are formed by subject–auxiliary inversion. The questions resemble those of Stage 3, but there is more variety in the auxiliaries that appear before the subject.

      Are you going to play with me?

      At this stage, children can even add ‘do’ in questions in which there would be no auxiliary in the declarative version of the sentence.

      Do dogs like ice cream?

      Even at this stage, however, children seem able to use either inversion or a wh-word, but not both (for example, ‘Is he crying?’ but not ‘Why is he crying?’

      Therefore, we may find inversion in yes/no questions but not in wh- questions, unless they are formulaic units such as ‘What’s that?’

       Stage 5

      At Stage 5, both wh- and yes/no questions are formed correctly.

      Are these your boots?

      Why did you do that?

      Does Daddy have a box?

      Negative questions may still be a bit too difficult.

      Why the teddy bear can’t go outside?

      And even though performance on most questions is correct, there is still one more hurdle. When wh- words appear in subordinate clauses or embedded questions, children overgeneralize the inverted form that would be correct for simple questions and produce sentences such as:

      Ask him why can’t he go out.

       Stage 6

      At this stage, children are able to correctly form all question types, including negative and complex embedded questions.

      Passage through developmental sequences does not always follow a steady uninterrupted path. Children appear to learn new things and then fall back on old patterns when there is added stress in a new situation or when they are using other new elements in their language. But the overall path takes them toward a closer and closer approximation of the language that is spoken around them.