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.