Contenu du sommaire : Acquisition et reformulation, sous la direction de Claire Martinot

The present study presents a preliminary report from a larger project examining the role of adult reformulations of children's utterances. Adult reformulations appear to serve two roles simultaneously in adult-child conversations: they provide a means whereby adult speakers can check up on what a child meant by what he said, and they offer a conventional way of expressing what the child appeared to have meant on each occasion. Analysis of two corpora, one French and one English, showed that adults are more likely to reformulate erroneous child utterances than conventional, grammatical ones, and that they produce many more reformulations when the children are younger and in fact producing a higher proportion of errors. Evidence that children attend to and make use of adult reformulations can be adduced from their acceptances and rejections of reformulations. While children tacitly accept most adult reformulations as next turns in the conversation, they also offer explicit acceptances, with overt uptake in their own next turns, and explicit rejections, where the adult has misunderstood what the child was trying to say. This suggests that adult reformulations provide an essential ingredient in the process of acquisition. The contrast between child and adult forms offers children data relevant to changing their own internal representations in memory, and so moving the forms of their emerging language ever closer to the patterns of adult usage in the community around them.

Among the various strategies of scaffolding used by the adult to engage the child in linguistic interaction, imitation, reformulation occupy a central position and facilitate the appropriation of different linguistics behaviours by the child. Through examples of adult-deaf child linguistic interaction analysed in the framework of Intonology Developmental Interactive, we will try to better understand effects of this strategies to solve the problems of intercomprehension that they find in the course of their conversations and on children' linguistic behaviour.

This paper focuses on the verbal scaffolding offered by adults to six-years old children with and without developmental language disorders. Each adult-child dyad interacts in a situation where the child has to give information to the adult, so that the latter can be able to do a construction. The repetitions and the reformulations of children's language by the adults are analysed as well as children's reactions to these adults' verbalizations. Different categories are distinguished. The results show differencies between the two groups of children. Whith the normal children the adults use above all lexical reformulations and partial repetitions; with the language-impaired children the syntactic reformulations and total repetitions appear more frequently. The normal children react more frequently than the language-impaired children. The influence of the situation and of the language disorders is discussed.

Reprise is used to refer not only to repetition but also to any new use of the same linguistic segment, wich can either reproduce its pragmatic value or constitute a referential, formal or generic link. Reprise is indeed a multidimensional and plurifonctionnal discursive move. This article deals with the way (allo and self) reprise moves of a toddler contribute to discursive continuity and construction. First, reprise establishes a link between utterances, allowing the articulation of propositions inside a turn and continuity between adjacent or distant turns. At the same time, reprise conveys not only a formal link between utterances but also specific inter-discursive and co-referential relationships. It carries the seeds of later anaphoric relationships. Finally, reprise plays a key role in the development of the child's dialogic involvement, allowing him to take over adult's discourse and to build on these basis his own contribution and footing.

According to their age, children tend not to reformulate the same story in the same matter previously heard even though the overall content is similar. Reformulation processes used by these children from the age 5 to 11 reveal at what acquisition stage each and every one of them is. Spatial and temporal expressions respectively result in very different achievements. Concerning spatial reference, entity location seems to be acquired by the age of 9 and directional expression by the age of 11. In the temporal area, children aren't able to evaluate an event frequency before the age of 8. The slow spatial and temporal development is mainly due to the misknowledge of the different prepositional values. Moreover, reformulation analysis shows that children reformulate most of the verbal predicates while defining them. This way of sense build up shows that definition types depend on both verbal lexicon and children age.