Issues in Applied Linguistics

This study examines the production of wh-questions in the speech off our monolingual child speakers of Catalan who were recorded longitudinally as part of the study carried out by Serra & Sole, obtained from the CHILDES Data Base (MacWhinney & Snow, 1985). In this data all wh-questions produced appeared to be adult-like, in contrast with the non-adult-like production of this construction in child English, Swedish, Dutch and German. However, there is an initial period in which no wh-questions at all are produced, in spite of the fact that other aspects of syntax, such as negation, clitic-placement and complementation seem adult-like in this same period. During this "no wh-question" period, there is a concomitant absence of verbal tense morphology, with the exceptions of present and irrealis forms (imperatives, root infinitives, root gerunds and root participles). Interestingly, the onset of wh-questions appears to correlate with the onset of a much wider variety of tense morphology. Given this observation and Rizzi's (1991) hypothesis that wh-questions and tense morphology are crucially linked in adult syntax, I propose that the early absence of wh-questions is a consequence of the early underspecification of tense.