Contenu du sommaire : L'acquisition du français langue maternelle, sous la direction de Claire Martinot

French infants vocal productions: Convergence toward the adult language patterns The study of French children's vocal productions suggests that, at each period of development, the emerging and developing aspects specific to French language are those aspects which are functional, given the children's cognitive capacities. Children soon overcome the limitations imposed by physiological and biological maturation, and their vocalisations reflect native language specificity well before they can say words. Language specificity first appears in the prosodic, then in the segmental characteristics of vocalisations. Language specificity also affects the way children's early words deviate from the adult model, and the kind of regularities that later emerge as a "proto-phonology", roughly at the time of lexical burst.

Semantic and syntax in word classes acquisition: Nouns and verbs in French This paper investigates semantic and syntactic aspects in the acquisition of word classes in early French during the 2nd and 3rd years of life. Using analyses of children's naturalistic productions, it provides an overview of the emergence of the lexicon, and focuses on the development of two central word classes, nouns and verbs. Developmental processes in the construction of both the notional-semantic and the grammatical classes are analysed for both nouns and verbs, and the relationships among all of these processes are examined in the light of an integrative conception of language acquisition.

Lexicon and syntax in the acquisition of French When children acquire a language, they learn both word meanings and construction meanings. For each word, they first produce subsets of possible combinations of a specific verb and some possible direct objects, say, or of another verb and some possible subjects. These early combinations let children to build up a repertoire, for each word, of the constructions it can appear in. This acquisition proceeds relatively slowly: children look for compatibility of meaning for words and constructions before they extent a construction to include new words, or a word to appear in new constructions. This proposal is illustrated with data from the acquisition of French.

The development of the argument structure of three essential verbs: mettre ('to put'), prendre ('to take'), donner ('to give') The verbs mettre ('to puť), prendre ('to take'), and donner ('to give'), which are very frequent and used very early with various semantic values, present different types of structural variations: they vary just as well according to the presence vs omission of their arguments in the target language as according to the nature of these arguments (pronominal, adverbial, or nominal). Nonetheless, with all three verbs the same relation was found between two otherwise independent phenomena, namely the lexical diversity of the nominal arguments increases as a function of verbal morphology in the following order: uninflected infinitival form, inflected form, complex form. These results are based on a thousand utterances produced by two-to four -year-old children.

The evolution of syntax in language acquisition and discourse variants. Observation of adult-child interactions in joint narrations This paper presents a qualitative approach to language learning through immediate and long-term interaction as an individual process in which the child incorporates into his own language elements and syntactic organisation from the adult's utterances (including the adult's reading of written texts such as children's books). Narration (studied in a longitudinal corpus of adult-child dialogues) is approached as a type of discourse in which certain characteristics of oral utterances can favour a child's later access to written language and autonomy through discourse variants answering to various degrees of syntactic complexity, decontextualization and completeness.

Spatial reference in French children's narrative: a crosslinguistic perspective Although the expression of motion and location follows some universal principles of organization, recent crosslinguistic research has shown that language-specific properties may affect how children acquire the relevant linguistic devices. Little is known, however, concerning spatial reference in French within this perspective and more research is necessary concerning the role of discourse determinants across languages. The present study addresses these questions by comparing narratives produced by adults and children in French and English. The results show large variations in predicate use across these languages at all ages, but similar developmental progressions in the ability to provide spatial anchors in discourse. The conclusion highlights the impact of language-specific properties on the organization of spatial reference at the sentence level, as well as the impact of universal discourse determinants in the developmental process.