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Accounts that specify semantic and/or syntactic complexity as the primary determinant of the order in which children acquire particular words or grammatical constructions have been highly influential in the literature on question acquisition. One explanation of wh-question ac-quisition in particular suggests that the order in which English speaking children acquire wh-questions is determined by two interlocking linguis-tic factors; the syntactic function of the wh-word that heads the question and the semantic generality (or ‘ lightness’) of the main verb (Bloom, Merkin & Wootten, 1982; Bloom, 1991). Another more recent view, however, is that acquisition is influenced by the relative frequency with which children hear particular wh-words and verbs in their input (e.g. Rowland & Pine, 2000). In the present study over 300 hours of naturalistic data from twelve two- to three-year-old children and their mothers were analysed in order to assess the relative contribution of [*] We would like to thank all the families who took part in the research reported here. The collection and transcription of the data presented here was funded by the Economic an