Retrieving the meaning of words from noun and verb grammatical contexts: Interindividual variation in a comprehension study of 2- to 4-year- old French-acquiring children

Edy Veneziano (1, 2, 3) , Christophe Parisse (1)

1 MoDyCo - Modèles, Dynamiques, Corpus
2 UPD5 - Université Paris Descartes - Paris 5
3 LPPS - EA 4057 - Laboratoire de Psychopathologie et Processus de Santé

Ninety French-speaking children aged 2 to 4 years were presented with short utterances containing homophonous or nonce words whose object or action meaning was identifiable on the sole basis of the preceding grammatical morpheme. Items in noun and verb contexts were presented to the same children in order to assess their ability to provide appropriate contrastive interpretations. Results show that, at all ages, items were correctly identified beyond chance, with 4-year-olds outperforming the 2- and 3-year-olds. Individually, however, only part of the children, even in the older group, performed beyond chance level, suggesting substantial interindividual variability and difficulties, still present at these ages, to tackle situations offering minimal information. A case study of the developmental relation between production and comprehension is also presented

Mots clés: first language acquisition; French; grammatical morphemes; noun-verb distinction; production and comprehension

Domaines: Linguistique

Edy Veneziano, Christophe Parisse. Retrieving the meaning of words from noun and verb grammatical contexts: Interindividual variation in a comprehension study of 2- to 4-year- old French-acquiring children. Maya Hickmann, Edy Veneziano and Harriet Jisa. Sources of Variations in First Language Acquisition: Languages, Contexts, and Learner, John Benjamins, pp.81-102, 2018, ⟨10.1075/tilar.22.05ven⟩. ⟨halshs-01630829⟩