Contenu du sommaire : Construction du discours par des enfants et des apprenants adultes, sous la direction de Marzena Watorek

Impact of available linguistic forms in different L1s: marking information status in L1 and L2. This comparative study investigates the impact of language specific means and constraints to mark new vs. given information on L1 and L2 development. It is based on a film retelling task involving Polish, English and French L1s (4, 7 and 10 years) and Polish and English advanced learners of L2 French (10 subjects per group). Results across languages show that marking information status is a late development in L1 (from 7 years on) as opposed to formal correctness. The L2s mark new and given contrast with the means available for this purpose but have problems with gender and case. Specific means available in individual languages influence acquisition both ways. Children rather use forms coding one function, increasing early correctness. But this strategy hinders use of alternative expressions and delays their acquisition.

L'expression de la causalité dans le discours narratif en français Ll et L2. This paper relates the results of a developmental study on the expression of causal relations in French Ll and L2: we analyze the narrative discourse of French monolingual children aged 4, 7 and 10 in comparison to the narrative production of adult German and Polish learners of French L2. The analysis focuses on temporal vs. causal interclausal linking, the semantic type of the causal relations expressed and the linguistic means used to mark them. The results highlight similarities as well as specific features in the developmental pattern of the two populations: the child's development of causal relations reflects the elaboration of an underlying narrative structure, while the adult learner produce from the very beginning complete and coherent stories; all groups of children prefer to express causal relations which preserve the temporal succession of events (preference for marking consequence), while the progressive explicitation of causal relations in L2 can be best explained as attempts to diversify temporal relations from succession (preference for marking cause and goals).

The acquisition of the verbs and adverbs lexicon in French Ll and L2. We present research about the lexicon of verbs and temporal adverbs in French Ll and L2 in narrative discourse. The data come from French and Polish children (4, 7 and 10 years old) Ll, French and Polish adults Ll and Polish adults who learn French as a second language. One of the questions, which guides our research, was if the development of the verbal and adverbial lexicons is the same for the children (Ll) and the adults (L2)? Our analysis of the discourse construction brings to the fore the differences of the acquisition of the Ll and the L2 and the strategies of the learners for a complex task. The results show that the developments are not similar: the children have to manage the concept of temporality and the linguistic means even when the adults have to manage only the linguistic means. The latter present transfers of the aspectual features from their Slavonic mother tongue.

Le rôle des particules additives dans la construction de la cohésion discursive en langue maternelle et en langue étrangère. We compare the use of additive particles such as aussi ('also'), encore ('again, still'), and their 'translation equivalents', in a narrative task based on a series of pictures performed by groups of children aged 4 years, 7 years and 10 years using their first language (Ll French, German, Polish), and by adult Polish and German learners of French as a second language (L2). From the cross-sectional analysis we propose developmental patterns which show remarkable similarities for all types of learner, but which stem from different determining factors. For the children, the patterns can best be explained by the development of their capacity to use available items in appropriate discourse contexts; for the adults, the limitations of their linguistic repertoire at different levels of achievement determines the possibility of incorporating these items into their utterance structure. Finally, we discuss to what extent these general tendencies are influenced by the specificities of the different languages used.

L'expression de la localisation et du mouvement dans les descriptions et les récits en L1 et en L2. Recent research in language acquisition suggests that an important factor causing the difference between child L1 and adult L2 acquisition is the capacity to engage in complex verbal tasks. Thus, the construction of discourse (with its conceptual and linguistic complexities) seems constrained in the adult L2 case mainly by a lack of linguistic means; in the child L1 case by the gradual development of conceptual and communicative capacities. We tested this hypothesis by analysing reference to space in two tasks, a narrative and a description, as produced by child L1 and adult L2 learners of various source and target languages. Results confirm the hypothesis, and show that whereas both types of learners adapt to language-specific means available in the target, children have more problems conceptually with the task, whereas adults can compensate for their linguistic problems, given their understanding of the communicative situation.