Doctoral Dissertation Research - Acquisition of Questions in Bulgarian and English

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With support from the NSF Linguistics Program and the Office of International Science and Engineering this dissertation project will investigate language development in young Bulgarian and English children, concentrating on the development of questions. Young English-speaking children show a relatively protracted period of development in wh-questions (initiated by words like what and where), even though their input is uniform and perfect. The common errors are failure to include an auxiliary or failure to invert an auxiliary when it is present. The source of these errors is still unknown. Under the direction of Virginia Valian, Lidiya Tornyova will compare acquisition of both yes/no and wh-questions by 2- to 3-year-old Bulgarian- and English-speaking children, using an elicited imitation task in combination with natural observation. The study will address three broad research questions: 1) What is the role of cross-linguistic differences in the process of acquiring grammatical structures? 2) To what extent does the regularity of a language's structural properties determine the time-course and nature of its acquisition? 3) How do the differences in the distribution of regularity in two independent domains - question formation and overt subject use - affect language learning? The differences in question formation in Bulgarian and English will, we predict, make wh-questions easier to acquire in Bulgarian. We hypothesize that overt subject production in wh-questions will reflect requirements of the target language. Since Bulgarian is a null-subject language, we predict children will omit subjects more often than English-speaking children will.The research will increase our understanding of the development of questions by examining acquisition from a cross-linguistic perspective. Most of the data on yes/no and wh-question acquisition are from English. It is not known whether claims and hypotheses developed from English can be extended to languages, such as Bulgarian, which differ in important properties from English. Studying the development of Bulgarian questions will also help assess current contradictory claims and hypotheses proposed by studies on English language acquisition. The study will be the first investigation of Bulgarian acquisition of syntax. In a broader sense, the project will help establish collaborative research on early acquisition of Bulgarian. Lidiya Tornyova will collaborate with Dr. Krassimira Petrova, Assistant Professor of Slavic Studies at the University of Sofia, Bulgaria. The project will contribute recordings and transcriptions of Bulgarian spontaneous adult-child conversations to the CHILDES data bank, creating the first on-line corpus of Bulgarian child language.