Affiliation:
1. University of Kansas Intercampus Program in Communicative Disorders Kansas City-Lawrence
Abstract
According to the Auxiliary Clarification Hypothesis (ACH), yes-no questions with sentence-initial auxiliaries (i.e., inverted questions) facilitate children's initial acquisition of auxiliary verbs. Sixteen 3-year-old children with specific language impairment (SLI) and 18 2-year-olds with typical language (TL) participated in an experiment to evaluate the ACH. The children were not yet making use of auxiliaries. Half of the children participated in twenty 30-min "enrichment" sessions over a 2-month period, during which an assistant produced 30 inverted question recasts in response to the child's own utterances. Fifteen question recasts contained the auxiliary
is
, and 15 contained the modal
will
. The other half of the children participated in play sessions but were not exposed to inverted
is
and
will
questions. Contrary to predictions based on the ACH, the results revealed no positive effects of the enrichment for
is
, for
will
, or for the broader
BE
and
Modal
auxiliary categories for either group of children. The children with TL demonstrated advantages over the children with SLI for the general category of
BE
forms but not for the category of
Modals
. Inverted questions may be too complex to foster the initial acquisition of auxiliaries in children not already using them productively.
Publisher
American Speech Language Hearing Association
Subject
Speech and Hearing,Linguistics and Language,Language and Linguistics
Cited by
38 articles.
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