ABSTRACT
English and many Romance languages show an inversion effect in wh-questions, but in English, there is a lot of individual variation and a long period of unstable development, while in Romance languages there is no individual variation and children produce adult-like inversion from their very first wh-questions. This chapter provides an explanation for this dramatic contrast, with a focus on English and Spanish, by attending both to the syntax and to the way that syntactic structures are processed. Spanish has both overt-null and preverbal-postverbal contrasts in its subjects, and it is shown that an overt preverbal subject is likely to make a wh-question particularly difficult to process. Evidence suggests that Spanish-speaking children converge very early on the existence of these overt-null and preverbal-postverbal contrasts and that they interpret these contrasts in an adult-like way. This provides us with a straightforward explanation as to why Spanish-speaking children never make errors with regard to inversion in wh-questions. In English, on the other hand, inversion requires a language-particular process of T-to-C movement, and children need time to acquire it. In both cases, children do the best they can with the abilities they have and the evidence available to them.
