Dominique Bassano

Developmental Changes and Variability in the Early Lexicon: A Study of French Children's Naturalistic Productions.

This paper investigates developmental changes, as well as inter-linguistic and inter-individual variations, in the expansion and composition of French childrens early lexicons. Two studies were conducted using childrens naturalistic productions: a longitudinal study of one child between 1;2 and 2;6, and a cross-sectional study of two groups (12 children each) aged 1;8 and 2;6. Analyses indicate that lexical productivity (measured in types, tokens, and new words) strongly increased with age, whereas lexical diversity showed almost no developmental progression. Nouns and para-lexical elements (including interjections, fillers or formulas) were predominant until 1;8 and decreased over time, while predicates and grammatical words increased. As compared to English, French development was characterized by less frequent nouns, initially more frequent predicates, and a remarkable expansion of grammatical words. Inter-individual variability in lexical productivity, in lexical diversity, and in the proportions of different categories was more marked at 1;8 than at 2;6. Lexical profiles found at 1;8 suggest the existence of more diversified organizational patterns than those captured in the referential-expressive distinction.

Early Acquisition of Verb Grammar and Lexical Development: Evidence from Periphrastic Constructions in French and Austrian German

This paper takes a functionalist approach to the acquisition of verb morphology in French and Austrian German. The development of periphrastic constructions using auxiliaries and modal verbs (compound past, modal constructions and analytic future) was examined in two French and two Austrian children’s spontaneous speech samples from the onset of production until 3;0. Crosslinguistic comparisons showed both similarities and differences in the development of periphrastic constructions (e.g., compound past was the first structure to emerge in French but not in Austrian German, analytic future was the last in both languages), suggesting an interplay between general cognitive and language-specific factors. In the four children, developmental analyses showed precursors, such as bare infinitives and past participles and preverbal fillers, which denote a gradual and continuous acquisition process. They also showed temporal relations between grammaticization and lexical production of verbs, which is an argument for the ‘critical lexical mass’ hypothesis and for interdependencies between lexical and grammatical developments. These analyses support a constructivist and interactive view of language acquisition.

A naturalistic study of early lexical development: General processes and inter-individual variations in French children

This study investigated early lexical development in French by analysing changes and variability in lexical production and composition of children’s spontaneous speech samples from three age groups: 1;8, 2;6 and 3;3 years (20 children in each). Analyses of general developmental changes showed that lexical productivity increased strongly between 1;8 and 2;6 and between 2;6 and 3;3. Changes in lexical composition mostly occurred between 1;8 and 2;6, indicating that the most important reorganizations are achieved by 2;6. The main changes observed (decreases in proportions of nouns and paralexical classes, and increases in proportions of predicate and grammatical classes) fit overall the developmental trajectories found for other languages, such as English and Italian. Two controversial issues were particularly examined and discussed with regard to cognitive, language-specific and methodological factors: noun-verb asynchrony and grammatical word explosion. Quantitative individual differences in lexical composition were greater at 1;8 than at 2;6 and 3;3, supporting the hypothesis that stylistic variation decreases in the course of the third year. Children’s lexical profiles were strikingly diversified at 1;8, whereas they appeared as variants of a same ‘grammatical profile’ at 2;6 and 3;3. We propose that the decline of stylistic variations reflects the impact of developmental constraints, such as the necessity for children to produce function words, which suggests that variations found in the youngest children are not determinant factors for subsequent lexical development.

Early grammatical and prosodic marking of utterance modality in french: a longitudinal case study

The study investigates how basic communicative functions expressed by utterance modalities (declarative, exclamative, injunctive, interrogative) emerged in the early language of a French child, and examines whether and how morphosyntactic and prosodic devices were used to mark these contrasts. A longitudinal corpus of naturalistic productions was collected between the ages of 1; 2 and 1; 9, and 960 utterances were subjected to functional, prosodic and grammatical analyses. Declarative, exclamative and injunctive utterances were found from 1; 2, and first interrogatives appeared at 1; 6. Intonation contours varied as a function of utterance modality and were largely in accordance with the patterns in French: declaratives and exclamatives were falling, interrogatives rising and injunctives split between falling and rising contours depending on their specific functions. A quarter of the productions involved an elementary grammatical marking of utterance modality such as interjections, imperative or indicative verbal forms, or interrogative morphemes. These findings indicate an early and complementary use of prosodic and grammatical devices in the childs construction of the linguistic system.

Noun grammaticalization and determiner use in French children's speech: A gradual development with prosodic and lexical influences

This study investigates when and how French-learning children acquire the main grammatical constraint on the noun category, i.e. the obligatory use of a preceding determiner. Spontaneous speech samples coming from the corpora of twenty children in each of three age groups, 1 ; 8, 2 ; 6, 3 ; 3, were transcribed and coded with respect to morphosyntactic, lexical and length properties of nouns. Results indicate that noun grammaticalization is a gradual process which involves early transitional procedures, as well as an increasing diversity in the content and contexts of determiner use. In support of prosodic hypotheses, noun length effects (in favor of monosyllabic nouns) mostly occurred at 1 ; 8. Animacy effects supporting the lexical hypothesis (in favor of inanimate nouns) occurred at 2 ; 6 and 3 ; 3. We suggest that noun grammaticalization is influenced by both prosodic and lexical factors. Prosodic influences predominate in the first steps of the developmental process, while lexical influences emerge in later steps.

A comparative and dynamic approach to the development of determiner use in three children acquiring different languages

The study investigates the development of determiner use in three children acquiring French, Austrian German and Dutch, from the onset of language until age 3;0. Noun constructions (determiner omission, correct bare nouns, filler and determiner uses) in the children and in their inputs are analysed, providing evidence of similarities in developmental shape as well as differences in frequencies and timing. As expected, determiner use was delayed in the Germanic languages as compared to French. Differences between the Austrian and the Dutch child were explained by language properties and by child characteristics. Modelling dynamic input–output relations provided evidence of styles of long-term parental adaptation (accommodation for the French and complementarity for the Dutch and Austrian children).

Verb agreement processing in French : A study of on-line grammaticality judgments

This study investigates the implementation of the syntactic constraint of verb agreement in French sentence processing. An experimental on-line error detection paradigm is used to examine how variations in linguistic material interposed between the subject and the verb affected the detection of number-verb agreement violations. Detection times mainly vary as a function of the linguistic structure of the interposed material: detection times are clearly longer for noun complements than for relative clauses and adverbial complements. Effect of length is shown to depend marginally on the structure type. Number mismatch between local and head nouns increases detection times, which also varies as a function of the morphology of the head noun. Results are analyzed with regard to processes found in agreement-error production studies. The role of structural, morphological, and semantic information in syntactic verb agreement processing is discussed within a crosslinguistic perspective.

Prosody and animacy in the development of noun determiner use: A cross- linguistic approach

This study investigates prosodic (noun length) and lexical-semantic (animacy) influences on determiner use in the spontaneous speech of three children acquiring French, Austrian German and Dutch. In support of typological and language-specific hypotheses from the Germanic–Romance contrast, an advantage of monosyllabic nouns and of inanimate nouns for taking a determiner or filler was found in French, but not in Austrian German or Dutch. The authors discuss the possible contributory role of these factors on determiner acquisition from a cross-linguistic perspective, also accounting for more specific differences between Austrian German and Dutch.

La fonction argumentative des marques de la langue

The present paper reports a set of experimental studies concerning the comprehension of French argumentative operators and connectives.The first part is a presentation of the theoretical framework, the methodological problems and some of the most general results. Experiments were carried out in the perspective of the linguistic theory of argumentation developed by Anscombre and Ducrot. According to this theory, a number of devices in language are mainly defined by their argumentation function, i.e. by the types of discursive sequences and conclusions they involve. Three categories of such devices were examined: (1) operators like “presque” (almost), “à peine” (hardly), “au moins” (at least), etc. which give an argumentative orientation to the statement; (2) co-orientation connectives, like “même” (even), which relate two statements oriented towards the same conclusion; (3) counter-orientation connectives, like the concessive ones (“mais” (but), “quand même” (even so), etc.), which relate two statements oriented towards opposite conclusions. The data shed light on issues such as: What is the nature of the relationship between the informative and argumentative functions of different operators? Is there a hierarchical relation between the argumentative processes of “co-orientation” and “counter-orientation”? What is the role of negation in the processing of argumentative sequences?The second part of the paper focuses specifically on the study of how 8 and 10 year-old children process “counter-oriented” statements. Five concessive connectives were studied: “mais”, “pourtant”, “quand même”, “même si”, “bien que”. The test was composed of two successive completion tasks: in one task the children had to choose the relevant context of complex sentences involving concessive connectives; in the other task they had to choose their relevant conclusion. Main results show a clear evolution in the performance of children between 8 and 10, suggesting that concessive strategies are not completely mastered at the age of 8. Differences among the concessive connectives studied were brought out: the item “quand même” obtained much better results than the other items with 8-year-old subjects; statements with “mais” seemed to be better processed in the conclusion task than in the context task, especially by 10-year-old subjects. These results are compared with other data obtained in some of the numerous studies on the production and comprehension of concessive connectives in various languages, and discussed from the point of view of argumentative theory.

Focusing in statement interpretation

The present study reports on the processing strategies used by young children (7 and 9) in a task of statement interpretation. The statements were composed of two assertions, presented either in parataxis (“Peter sees, he has a marble”) or in a modal structure (“Peter sees that he has a marble”); variations on the form of the verb (affirmative or negative) and on the subjects of the two predicates (same subject or different subjects) were also taken into account. Through the study of the processing order of the two assertions, the purpose was to bring out the phenomena of semantic focusing on one or the other piece of information. The task used was a construction task: The child had to enact the statements with the help of various elements corresponding to the different assertions. Main results showed that, when the information was presented in parataxis, it was generally processed in the enunciation order. On the other hand, in the modal form the focusing was clear: It bore on the dictum (“to have a marble”) in the affirmative form, and on the modal verb (“Peter does not see...”) when it was negative. The interpretation of the various focusing processes are discussed.