Scholars International Journal of Linguistics and Literature (SIJLL)
Volume-5 | Issue-09 | 295-302
Original Research Article
Production of Adjunct Wh-Questions in Egyptian Arabic Monolingual and Egyptian Arabic-English Bilingual Children
Riham Hafez Mohamed
Published : Sept. 20, 2022
Abstract
This pilot study examines the production of Egyptian Arabic (henceforth EA) adjunct wh-questions (e.g., when) among two EA-English bilingual Children living in Ontario, Canada and an EA monolingual child living in Cairo, Egypt. The control group consists of two first-generation adult Egyptian immigrants in Ontario, Canada. The focus of the study is on the position of wh-phrases in EA wh-adjuncts, which exhibits a surface overlap between English and EA. In typical English wh-adjuncts, and wh-arguments as well, leaving the wh-phrase where it was originally generated (wh-in-situ) is ungrammatical and the wh-phrase must occur clause-initially (fronted wh-phrase) (Radford, 2004). In EA wh-adjuncts, there are two possible positions of the wh-phrase, fronted wh-phrase and wh-in-situ (Wahba, 1984). Findings from an oral elicited production task showed that the EA monolingual child significantly preferred wh-in-situ (94.4% of the time), and a fronted wh-phrase occurred only once in his responses. In contrast, the EA-English bilingual children predominantly preferred fronting the wh-phrase (97.3% of the time). As the fronted wh-question is the only grammatical option in typical English wh-questions, this result may indicate a possible crosslinguistic influence from English, the majority language of the bilinguals’ society, into EA. Regarding the adult controls, they showed true optionality as they produced roughly around the same amount of the fronted wh-phrase and wh-in-situ, 52.8% and 47.2% respectively. The results are discussed in relation to the crosslinguistic influence hypothesis of Müller and Hulk (2001) and the developmental trajectory proposed by Shin & Miller (2021).