Children’s production of wh -questions across five language families

In this paper, we present data from an elicited production experiment involving matrix wh-questions in five languages: German, Hungarian, Malayalam, Mandarin, and Yoruba. The aim of our study was to replicate previously observed asymmetries (between subject and object wh-questions, and between who and which N questions) in new languages, and to identify commonalities across languages in the production of non-target alternative forms of wh-questions. Our findings suggest that the subject wh-question advantage is generally observed, but not the who-question advantage over the which-question. This may indicate an unexpected difference between comprehension and which-question production.

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Publication Details

Journal
Language Acquisition
Published
2026-10-27
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1080/10489223.2026.2692517
Primary Topic
Language Development and Disorders
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
0.00

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article

Children’s production of wh -questions across five language families

Aijun Huang, Vaijayanthi M. Sarma, Silvia Silleresi, Lilla Pintér et al.
1 links
Language Acquisition
Language Development and Disorders
article

Children’s production of wh -questions across five language families

Aijun Huang, Vaijayanthi M. Sarma, Silvia Silleresi, Lilla Pintér, Kazuko Yatsushiro, Johnson Folorunso Ilori, Maria Teresa Guasti, Uli Sauerland, Johannes Hein, Chiara Dal Farra, Aurore Gonzalez
article en

Abstract

In this paper, we present data from an elicited production experiment involving matrix wh-questions in five languages: German, Hungarian, Malayalam, Mandarin, and Yoruba. The aim of our study was to replicate previously observed asymmetries (between subject and object wh-questions, and between who and which N questions) in new languages, and to identify commonalities across languages in the production of non-target alternative forms of wh-questions. Our findings suggest that the subject wh-question advantage is generally observed, but not the who-question advantage over the which-question. This may indicate an unexpected difference between comprehension and which-question production.

Language Acquisition
Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IN), Shanghai Jiao Tong University (CN), University of Lagos (NG), ELTE Research Centre for Linguistics (HU), Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (DE), Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics (DE), University of Milano-Bicocca (IT)
European Commission, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
Openalex Percentile: Top 5%
Language Development and Disorders
DOIOpen Access PDFOpenAlex
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Children’s production of wh -questions across five language families — Aijun Huang, Vaijayanthi M. Sarma, et al. · Language Acquisition (2026) | TGRS Research Map | TGRS