Lucie Godard

Grammatical and Situational Aspect in French: A Developmental Study.

We study the ability of children to provide an appropriate continuation for a stimulus sentence, taking into account the joint demands of situational aspect and grammatical aspect. We hypothesize that the aspectual transitions required by some aspectual combinations play a role in the difficulty of providing an approrpriate continuation for them. We tested 130 French-speaking children of 5;06 to 9;0. In general, the data are consistent with the idea that the ability of children to construe an appropriate continuation for a stimulus clause is a function of both the situational aspect of the clause and the grammatical aspect provided by the verbal morpheme. There is a significant tense x situational aspect interaction in the number of continuations that children are able to provide in answer to the stimuli. Contrary to our expectations, there is no significant tense x situational aspect in the number of appropriate continuations, this being perhaps due to the small number of continuations for each stimulus type, but there are trends in the expected direction, which further studies may be able to confirm.

La Lecture interactive d'albums pour les élèves du préscolaire ayant des difficultés langagières : une intervention prometteuse pour améliorer le vocabulaire

Cette etude evalue l’impact d’une adaptation de la Lecture interactive d’albums (Wasik & Bond, 2001) sur le vocabulaire et sur certaines habiletes langagieres d’eleves du prescolaire ayant un retard severe de langage (n = 7). L’intervention (5 semaines) combinait des methodes d’apprentissage implicite et explicite a travers la lecture d’histoire. Un test t a echantillons apparies montre une amelioration significative du vocabulaire receptif et des reseaux semantiques. Ainsi, l’etude met en lumiere une dichotomie entre le developpement des versants receptif et expressif et demontre la possibilite d’implanter une intervention en vocabulaire en contexte de classe. -------------------------------------------------------------------- This study aims to measure the impact of an adaptation of the Interactive Book Reading (Wasik & Bond, 2001) on vocabulary and other related language abilities of kindergarteners with language impairment (LI) (n = 7). The intervention (5 weeks) involved indirect and direct instruction through book reading. A t-test for paired sample shows a significant improvement of receptive vocabulary and semantic networks. These results indicate a dichotomy between the production and the comprehension of words. Further directions for vocabulary intervention through book reading with LI children will be discussed in light of the results.