Wh-Interrogatives in Early L1 Greek: Comprehension vs. Production

This paper examines the comprehension and production of wh-interrogatives in early L1 Greek. Specifically, children’s performance is explored at both levels with regard to argument/adjunct extraction and presence/absence of negation. In order to test the predicted lead of comprehension over production, a group of ninety four-to-seven-year old Greek children participated in elicitation tasks that were designed mainly along the methodological principles of Crain and Thornton (1998). On the whole, the results were in line with the initial expectation. That is, the Greek children performed better in question comprehension compared to question production, with individual findings suggesting that children’s economy-based processing may not be constrained exclusively by syntactic factors.