Karine Duvignau

Aquisição inicial do léxico verbal e aproximações semânticas em português

The analogical reasoning that allows relating concepts, permits the construction of the conceptual system. In the early phase of lexicon acquisition, mainly between 2 and 4 years of age, linguistic productions are observed resulting from the analogical reasoning, sometimes named metaphors. According to Duvignau (2002, 2003), these emissions result from the semantic approximation by analogy, a mechanism that allows approaching concepts more or less distant from the available lexicon. This study dimensions the importance of verbal semantic approximations for the early lexical development of monolingual children of the Portuguese language and studies the resource to generic versus specific items. Eighty monolingual children between 2 and 4 years old and 75 undergraduate students took part of this study, answering the Actions Naming and Reformulation Tasks. The results conclude that the semantic approximation by analogy is a fundamental linguistic strategy for lexicon development and reveals the cognitive flexibility which is present in typical development.

Metaphor, Metonymy, and Their Interaction in the Production of Semantic Approximations by Monolingual Children: A Corpus Analysis.

The present study looks into the largely unexplored territory of the cognitive underpinnings of semantic approximations in child language. The analysis of a corpus of 233 semantic approximations produced by 101 monolingual French-speaking children from 1;8 to 4;2 years of age leads to a classification of a significant number of them as instances of a set of principle-governed cognitive operations, including metaphor and metonymy-based cognitive operations, and conceptual complexes, such as metaphtonymies and double metonymies. The results shed light on cognitive operation preferences and their level of conceptual complexity at this stage of language development. Additionally, it points to the need to expand the inventory of functions traditionally assigned to these cognitive operations.

POUR UNE APPROCHE TRANSPATHOLOGIQUE ET TRANSLINGUISTIQUE DE L'APPROXIMATION SÉMANTIQUE ; LE CAS DES TED : VERS UNE RIGIDITÉ LEXICALE CARACTÉRISTIQUE DE L'ASPERGER EN L1 ET L2

Studies in field of semantic approximations and metaphor focus on the lexicon of nouns, to the detriment of an investigation of verbs. In this paper we examine verbal semantic approximations produced by young French children vs Asperger and hight functioning Autism during a naming task to describe actions in short action- video sequences. Our aim is to shed light on early linguistic and conceptual development of the verbal lexicon by studying production of semantic approximation both in first (L1) and second (L2) language. The results (a) show the striking similarity between young children in L1 and children or adult second language learners (L2); and (b) support our hypothesis that the production of semantic approximation in Asperger is very different from normal children and children with hight functioning autism. The problems of Asperger subjects in producting semantic approximations would point to a significant deficiency in the development of the lexical system, to be seen as a major cause of their communicative handicap: inability to handle approximative expressions, production and looking for specific words, lack of adaptation to lexical variations and thus communication problems with those with whom they are trying to communicate, being locked into specialised lexical worlds.

For a New Look at ‘Lexical Errors’: Evidence from Semantic Approximations with Verbs in Aphasia

The ability to understand the similarity between two phenomena is fundamental for humans. Designated by the term analogy in psychology, this ability plays a role in the categorization of phenomena in the world and in the organisation of the linguistic system. The use of analogy in language often results in non-standard utterances, particularly in speakers with aphasia. These non-standard utterances are almost always studied in a nominal context and considered as errors. We propose a study of the verbal lexicon and present findings that measure, by an action-video naming task, the importance of verb-based non-standard utterances made by 17 speakers with aphasia (“la dame déshabille l’orange”/the lady undresses the orange, “elle casse la tomate”/she breaks the tomato). The first results we have obtained allow us to consider these type of utterances from a new perspective: we propose to eliminate the label of “error”, suggesting that they may be viewed as semantic approximations based upon a relationship of inter-domain synonymy and are ingrained in the heart of the lexical system.

P3-112: Cross-cultural effects on action naming in French and Brazilian Portuguese native speaker Alzheimer's disease patients

Episodic memory* (CANTAB PAL ) 4.8 (3.2, 6.4) 19.1 (14.6, 23.5) 30.2 (29.7, 30.6) Episodic memory (CAMCOG Learning) 12.1 (11.4, 12.8) 11.1 (9.8, 12.3) 4.7 (3.0, 6.5) Semantic memory* (GNT) 26.1 (25.2, 27.1) 22.2 (20.1, 23.8) 9.8 (6.9, 12.7) Working memory (Digit span) 6.3 (5.8, 6.8) 6.7 (6.0, 7.4) 5.2 (4.6, 5.9) Spatial Memory* Route Learning 32.7 (29.8, 35.6) 20.4 (15.7, 25.1) 8.9 (6.7, 11.1) Spatial Memory* Route Recall 12.0 (11.0, 13.0) 7.5 (5.5, 9.5) 3.1 (1.7, 4.5) Processing speed 19.8 (18.4, 21.3) 16.3 (14.0, 18.6) 13.7 (10.7, 16.8) Executive function* (Stroop interference) 24.4 (22.2, 26.5) 18.1 (14.6, 21.7) 11.4 (8.3, 14.5)