The Comprehension of 'who' and 'what' Questions in Normally Developing Korean Children

$30{\sim}47$ 개월 일반아동의 의문사 질문 이해 발달: 누가, 누구를, 누구한테, 무엇이, 무엇을

The present study was designed to investigate the comprehension of 'who' and 'what' questions in 2- to 3-year-old normal children. Sixty children were divided into 3 groups depending on their ages, i.e., age groups 2;6-2;11, 3;0-3:5, and 3;6-3;11. Three types of 'who' questions and 2 types of 'what' questions were generated depending on the attached case markers, i.e., who-nominative, who-accusative, who-dative, what-nominative, and what-accusative. The children watched 36 cuts of short video recordings. After watching each cut, they were asked to answer one of the 5 types of wh-questions. For the 'who-nominative' and 'what-accusative' questions, even the late 2-year-old children performed with over 70% of accuracy, and the late 3-year-old children performed with over 95% of accuracy. For the 'who-accusative' and 'who-dative' questions, the late 2-year olds exhibited difficulty in comprehension with performance accuracy of 41% and 33%, respectively. However, the late 3-year olds could comprehend those questions correctly with over 90% of accuracy. On the other hand, in answering 'what-nominative' questions, the children did not show rapid development across the age groups, as the mean performance accuracies of the 3 groups were 39%, 49%, and 59%, respectively. The results indicated that children's understanding of a wh- question is largely affected by the case of the interrogative.