Acquisition of Main-Clause Wh-Questions in Egyptian Arabic-English and Spanish-English Bilingual Children
Abstract
This dissertation examines the production and judgment of Egyptian Arabic (henceforth EA) main-clause wh-questions in EA-English bilingual children living in Ontario, Canada, or in the United Kingdom. The three comparison groups are EA monolingual children and EA monolingual adults living in Egypt, and first-generation Egyptian immigrants. The results are compared to previous research on the acquisition of obligatory subject-verb (S-V) inversion in Spanish wh-questions.
The focus of this study is to investigate the potential role of cross-linguistic influence in narrow syntactic structures. Until fairly recently, it was believed that only structures that exhibit syntax-pragmatics interfaces are vulnerable to cross-linguistic influence (Müller and Hulk, 2001). Yet, there is growing empirical evidence that cross-linguistic influence can also occur in narrow syntactic structures with no pragmatic or discourse motivations, providing that there is a surface overlap between the bilinguals’ two languages in these structures (Albirini et al.; 2011; Cuza, 2016; Mohamed, 2022).
The domain of wh-questions exhibits surface overlap among the three chosen languages, English, Spanish, and EA, regarding two syntactic properties, (i) wh-movement and (ii) S-V inversion. Regarding wh-movement, a wh-phrase must move to a clause-initial position (wh-fronting) in typical Spanish and English main-clause wh-questions. In contrast, wh-fronting is ungrammatical in EA complement wh-questions and leaving the complement wh-phrases in their canonical position (wh-in-situ) is the grammatical option. Nonetheless, both wh-fronting and wh-in-situ are grammatically correct in EA adjunct wh-questions (Wahba, 1984). Concerning S-V inversion in main-clause wh-questions, it is ungrammatical in English (Carnie, 2013), obligatory in Spanish with some exceptions (Camacho, 2018), and optional but not the default option in EA (Edwards. 2010).
Results from an Elicited Production Picture Task and a Grammaticality Choice Task showed that the bilingual children have a robust knowledge of obligatory structures in EA wh-questions. The study concluded that there is a tentative cross-linguistic influence from English in narrow syntactic structures of EA wh-questions. However, such influence occurs when the majority language’s structures are allowed by the linguistic system of the minority language, namely wh-fronting in wh-adjuncts, but not when they are ungrammatical in the minority language, as in the case of wh-fronting in wh-complements.