An analysis of YES/NO questions in input and their relationship with rate of auxiliary verb development in young children
Abstract
Abstracts of the 1986 Child Language SeminarAn analysis of YES/NO questions in input and their relationship with rate of auxiliary verb development in young children SAGE Publications, Inc.1986DOI: 10.1177/014272378600601823 Brian Richards University of Bristol Four major longitudinal studies of the relationship between input variables and rate of language development show significant effects of yes/no questions on children's subsequent auxiliary verb learning. The standard explanation is that yes/no questions display the auxiliary in an uncontracted and stressed form which is more salient than when placed medially. However, this assumption of auxiliary 'clarification' has been challenged. In addition, three of the four studies find effects related to non-inverted yes/no questions. The present investigation addresses these issues by undertaking a more detailed analysis of samples of the Bristol child language corpus used by Barnes, Gutfreund, Satterly & Wells (1983). Yes/no questions addressed to 32 children were coded for syntactic features and discourse function. Patterns of stress and contraction were analysed for a sub-sample of 16. Of all yes/no sub-categories it is inversions in utterances which initiate exchanges which predict auxiliary gains most strongly. However, effects were found to vary, depending on the definition of 'input' from which frequencies were calculated. The