Wh-questions in Dutch

This study investigates cross-linguistic influence in Dutch wh-questions in bilingual Dutch-French and trilingual Dutch-French-Italian acquisition. Five and seven year-old bilingual and trilingual children as well as monolingual children and adult controls (N = 49) participated in an elicited production task. In addition to target-like wh-fronted questions with subject-verb inversion, the majority of responses, the multilingual children produced two qualitatively different structures: wh-in-situ questions and wh-fronted questions without inversion. These structures are argued to result from transfer from French, and in the case of non-inversion with the wh-word why in the trilingual group from transfer from Italian. It is proposed that a theory of transfer based on derivational complexity can best account for these data.