ABSTRACT
This chapter gives an overview of studies on the L2 acquisition and development of wh-questions, yes-no questions and embedded questions. Beginning with grammar-based approaches to the development of interrogatives, we discuss some of the syntactic features affecting these structures, such as island constraints, verb-movement, resumptive pronouns and derivational complexity, measured primarily through offline tasks such as judgements, comprehension and production tasks. As the field has begun to include online tasks and psycholinguistic measures into its methodology, processing-based accounts of the L2 development of interrogatives have increasingly gained prominence. We discuss how processing mechanisms affect the development of L2 questions, drawing from studies that investigate processing load in filler-gap dependencies (e.g., subject/object asymmetry), the role played by the L1 grammar in L2 parsing strategies (e.g., diverging word order) and processing principles said to solely determine the acquisition sequence of interrogatives.
