The role of person in subject auxiliary inversion in English wh-questions: Evidence from Korean-English bilingual children

Aims: The present study investigates whether Korean-English (K-E) bilingual children develop subject auxiliary inversion (SAI) in English wh-questions differently from monolingual English (M-E) speaking children. Specifically, an experimental study was designed to determine whether there is an effect of subject person in their acquisition of SAI in English wh-questions, a factor that had been suggested but not tested as a contributing factor in SAI in a previous study. Design: Twenty-six K-E bilingual and 20 M-E preschool-aged children were recruited for an elicitation study testing the effect of person on the use of SAI in wh-questions in English. The experiment consisted of having children interact with puppets in a guessing game that elicited first, second, and third person object-what questions in English. Data and analysis: Data from the experiment were analyzed through a binomial logistic regression, which accounts for the binary nature of the data (auxiliary inversion: present or absent) and identified which variables contribute significantly to the presence and absence of SAI. Findings/conclusions: Results indicated a significant difference between K-E and M-E groups and a significant main effect for person on SAI for the K-E group. The paper proposes that the [prs] feature is part of the bundle of features that drives the movement of the features in T to C. Originality: The paper contributes evidence for a link between the person feature and SAI, a link that has not been seen before for wh-question