This study examines syntactic and morphological aspects of the production and comprehension of pronouns by 99 typically developing French-speaking children aged 3 years, 5 months to 6 years, 5 ...months. A fine structural analysis of subject, object, and reflexive clitics suggests that whereas the object clitic chain crosses the subject chain, the reflexive clitic chain is nested within it. We argue that this structural difference introduces differences in processing complexity, chain crossing being more complex than nesting. In support of this analysis, both production and comprehension experiments show that children have more difficulty with object than with reflexive clitics (with more omissions in production and more erroneous judgments in sentences involving Principle B in comprehension). Concerning the morphological aspect, French subject and object pronouns agree in gender with their referent. We report serious difficulties with pronoun gender both in production and comprehension in children around the age of 4 (with nearly 30% errors in production and chance level judgments in comprehension), which tend to disappear by age 6. The distribution of errors further suggests that the masculine gender is processed as the default value. These findings provide further insights into the relationship between comprehension and production in the acquisition process.
One major controversy in the field of language development concerns the nature of children's early representations of word order. While studies using preferential looking methods suggest that ...children as early as 20 months represent word order as an abstract, grammatical property, experiments using the Weird Word Order (WWO) paradigm suggest that it is represented as a lexical property until age four. In order to shed light on these contradictions, two types of arguments are developed. First, it is argued that the observations taken to support the lexical hypothesis, based on the WWO paradigm, have been incorrectly interpreted. Second, an experiment is reported using the standard WWO paradigm with minimal changes in the design. Two groups of French children were contrasted (mean ages 2;11 and 3;11). Both groups were found to (i) reproduce WWO at a similar, low rate; (ii) correct WWO at a similar rate, even with pseudo-verbs; (iii) reuse the grammatical, SVO order significantly more often than WWO; and (iv) produce grammatical markers, indicating productive use, in grammatical sentences only. We conclude that empirical evidence converges to support the grammatical hypothesis.
Mismatch negativity, an index of automatic cerebral activity in response to novel stimuli, was used to determine the onset of morphosyntactic processing in French. Stimuli were four two-word ...sentences made up of a pronoun (first or second person) and a verb (first or second person). Verb forms differed only in the inflectional suffix, which made the sentences either syntactically correct or incorrect. The mismatch negativity response was found to be modulated by the grammaticality of the agreement relation at 50-140 ms after inflection onset, corroborating the previous finding that morphosyntactic processing occurs early and out of the focus of attention. The role of the pronoun-suffix association probabilities in determining the observed timing of morphosyntactic processing is discussed.
Two experiments investigate whether native speakers of French can use a noun’s phonological ending to retrieve its gender and that of a gender-marked element. In Experiment 1, participants performed ...a gender decision task on the noun’s gender-marked determiner for auditorily presented nouns. Noun endings with high predictive values were selected. The noun stimuli could either belong to the gender class predicted by their ending (congruent) or they could belong to the gender class that was different from the predicted gender (incongruent). Gender decisions were made significantly faster for congruent nouns than for incongruent nouns, relative to a (lexical decision) baseline task. In Experiment 2, participants named pictures of the same materials as used in Experiment 1 with noun phrases consisting of a gender-marked determiner, a gender-marked adjective and a noun. In this Experiment, no effect of congruency, relative to a (bare noun naming) baseline task, was observed. Thus, the results show an effect of phonological information on the retrieval of gender-marked elements in spoken word recognition, but not in word production.
Syntactic Encoding Franck, Julie
The Handbook of Psycholinguistics,
10/2017
Book Chapter
The study of syntactic encoding faces two major questions: How can we characterize the syntactic representations underlying the sentences that speakers build? And how can we characterize the ...processes that deal with these representations? This chapter addresses these two questions through the lens of the research on how agreement derails in the production of attraction errors. I first review the strengths and weaknesses of the prominent Marking and Morphing model of agreement (Bock, Eberhard, Cutting, Meyer, & Schriefers, 2001) whose modular two‐level architecture provides a representative illustration of the psycholinguistic approach to syntactic encoding. I then lay out a typology of attraction effects based on an alternative model, Feature and Controller Selection that takes insights from both syntactic theory and the psychological theory of memory retrieval. Finally, I present novel empirical evidence showing a close alignment between syntactic structure and memory retrieval in attraction effects, and suggest that syntactic theory describes the strengths of memory representations.
We report a study on the spoken production of subject–verb agreement in number by four age groups of normally developing children (between 5 and 8;5) and a group of 8 children with Specific Language ...Impairment (SLI; between 5;4 and 9;4), all French speaking. The production of verb agreement was experimentally elicited by asking children to complete sentence preambles containing a head noun and a potentially attracting ‘local noun’. In contrast to previous studies that focused on attraction with local nouns within the subject constituent (postmodifiers), we also studied attraction with local nouns in structures that are not part of the subject constituent (interpolated adjuncts). In normally developing children, we report that (1) attraction effects appear from early on; (2) singular is produced as the default number until age 7 included; (3) more errors are produced with adjunct structures than with postmodifiers, but only from age 8;5 on. In contrast, even the older SLI children showed no attraction effect, a predominance of the singular as default, no effect of syntactic structure and, more generally, persistent high error rates. The turning point observed between 7 and 8;5 in normal children, characterized by a reduced error rate and a significant effect of syntactic structure, is interpreted as an index of the automatization of agreement. The syntactic structure effect is discussed in terms of the interplay of structural and working memory factors in the computation of long-distance relationships.
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