The knowledge of English multiple-wh questions in high-proficiency Japanese learners of English
Robert Bley-Vroman and Naoko Yoshinaga
University of Hawai'i

Multiple wh-questions contain two or more wh-phrases, all of which are used to request information.  Thus, in response to "Who ate what?", an appropriate answer would be "Tom ate an apple, Mary ate a banana, and John ate an orange"—this answer supplying information for both who and what.  It has long been noted  that not all combinations of wh-phrases are equally possible in English.  Japanese grammar is known to license a wider range of such questions than English—"Who came why?" for example, is perfectly natural in Japanese.  Various alternative theoretical accounts of these differences are outlined in this paper and their consequences for second language acquisition theory discussed. 
The specific research reported here investigates the knowledge of multiple wh-questions by high-proficiency non-native speakers of English with first language Japanese. Acceptability judgements were obtained on six different types of such questions in English by native speakers of English, in Japanese from native speakers of Japanese, and in English by high-proficiency Japanese speakers  of English. The results for native speakers judging their own language were generally in accord with expectations.  The high-level non-native speakers of English were significantly different from native speakers in their ratings of these sentences. However, the ratings were clearly not simply the result of native-language transfer of native-language judgements, nor do the results suggest parameter setting or resetting. The implications of the findings for theories of Universal Grammar in second language acquisition are discussed. In general, the results seem to be most compatible with a kind of weak conservatism and structure-by-structure acquisition, but many aspects of the picture remain unclear.
The paper makes use of analysis of variance, as is common in such studies. However, it also proposes that cluster analysis (specifically Ward's method) can be usefully applied to the analysis of data such as these, where alternative theoretical accounts predict different groupings of acceptability judgements.