This study examined subject-auxiliary inversion errors in wh-questions produced by 88 Korean EFL elementary learners, focusing on whether types of wh-words and auxiliaries could affect inversion acquisition and whether explicit instruction on movement rules could facilitate this process. Guided writing tasks were used as a pretest and a posttest to analyze influence of wh-words and auxiliaries on learners’ inversion in the pretest and effects of instruction on movement rules in the posttest. Results showed that both whwords and auxiliaries significantly influenced learners’ inversion acquisition. Learners struggled more with why-questions than with what-questions, which were selected as representatives of adjunct and argument wh-questions, respectively. More inversion errors occurred in wh-questions requiring do-support than in those involving auxiliary be or modal will, although no significant difference was found between be and will. Experimental lessons with brief explicit instruction on auxiliary movement during regular classes significantly improved learners’ inversion accuracy, particularly in dosupport questions, which posed the greatest challenge in the pretest.

Lim, Sang-bong. 1998. Acquisition of Subject-auxiliary Inversion in Child English and Optimality Theory. Studies in Modern Grammar 14, 349-364. The purpose of this paper is to examine whether the patterns of subject-auxiliary inversion in child English questions can be explained by the constraints in Grimshaw`s(1992) Optimality Theory account of inversion patterns in adult English questions. I briefly review the treatment of subject-auxiliary inversion within the Minimalist Theory. The theory claims that subject-auxiliary inversion is a subcase of head movement that moves an auxiliary across the sentence to the head of the presentential complementizer(CP) position in nonselected CPs. In this paper I try to show that the stages of acquisition in subject-auxiliary inversion and the patterns of inversion in child English. And I also show that an Optimality-Theoretic approach can explain several facts regarding the pattern of auxiliary inversion in child English. In addition, this paper argues that the constraints ranking of child English must be different from those of adult English to capture the characteristics of subject-auxiliary inversion in child English.