Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7czq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-27T21:14:10.776Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Prosodically-conditioned variability in children's production of French determiners*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 January 2008

KATHERINE DEMUTH  and
ANNIE TREMBLAY
KATHERINE DEMUTH*
Affiliation:
Brown University and University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa
ANNIE TREMBLAY
Affiliation:
Brown University and University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa
*
Address for correspondence: Department of Cognitive & Linguistic Sciences, Brown University, Box 1978, Providence, RI 02912. e-mail: [email protected].
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Researchers have long noted that children's grammatical morphemes are variably produced, raising questions about when and how grammatical competence is acquired. This study examined the spontaneous production of determiners by two French-speaking children aged 1 ; 5–2 ; 5. It found that determiners were produced earlier with monosyllabic words, and later with disyllabic and trisyllabic words. This suggests that French-speaking children's early determiners are prosodically licensed as part of a binary foot, with determiners appearing more consistently only once prosodic representations become more complex. This study therefore provides support for the notion that grammatical morphemes first appear in prosodically licensed contexts, suggesting that some of the early variability in morphological production is systematic and predictable.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 35 , Issue 1 , February 2008 , pp. 99 - 127
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Allen, G. & Hawkins, S. (1978). The development of phonological rhythm. In Bell, A. & Hooper, J. B. (eds), Syllables and segments. North Holland: Amsterdam. pp. 178–85.Google Scholar
Bassano, D. & Maillochon, I. (2005). Noun grammaticization in French: Prosodic and lexical factors on determiner use in children's speech. Paper presented at the 10th Meeting of the International Association for the Study of Child Language (IASCL), Berlin.Google Scholar
Bortolini, U. & Leonard, L. (2000). Phonology and children with specific language impairment: status of structural constraints in two languages. Journal of Communication Disorders 33, 131–50.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bottari, P., Cipriani, P. & Chilosi, A. M. (1993/1994). Protosyntactic devices in the acquisition of Italian free morphology. Language Acquisition 3, 327–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Charette, M. (1991). Conditions on phonological government. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chierchia, G. (1998). Plurality of mass nouns and the notion of ‘semantic parameter’. In Rothstein, S. (ed.), Events and grammar, 53–103. Dordrecht: Kluwer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Demuth, K. (1992). Accessing functional categories in Sesotho: Interactions at the morpho-syntax interface. In Meisel, J. (ed.), The acquisition of verb placement: Functional categories and V2 phenomena in language development. Kluwer Academic Publishers: Dordrecht. pp. 83–107.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Demuth, K. (1994). On the ‘underspecification’ of functional categories in early grammars. In Lust, B., Suñer, M. & Whitman, J. (eds), Syntactic theory and first language acquisition: Cross-linguistic perspectives. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. pp. 119–34.Google Scholar
Demuth, K. (2001 a). Prosodic constraints on morphological development. In Weissenborn, J. & Höhle, B. (eds), Approaches to bootstrapping: Phonological, syntactic and neurophysiological aspects of early language acquisition. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. vol. 24, pp. 3–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Demuth, K. (2001 b). A prosodic approach to filler syllables. Journal of Child Language 28, 246–9.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Demuth, K. & Ellis, D. (in press). Revisiting the acquisition of Sesotho noun class prefixes. In Guo, J., Lieven, E., Ervin-Tripp, S., Budwig, N. & Nakamura, K. (eds), Crosslinguistic approaches to the psychology of language: Festschrift for Dan Slobin. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Demuth, K. & Johnson, M. (2003). Truncation to subminimal words in early French. Canadian Journal of Linguistics 48, 211–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Demuth, K., McCullough, E. & Adamo, M. (2007). The prosodic (re)organization of determiners. In Bamman, D., Magnitskaia, T. & Zaller, C. (eds), Proceedings of the 31st Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press. pp. 196–205.Google Scholar
Demuth, K., McCullough, E. & Kehoe, M. (2005). The acquisition of coda consonants and clusters in French. Paper presented at the 10th Meeting of the International Association for the Study of Child Language (IASCL), Berlin.Google Scholar
Gerken, L. A. (1994). Young children's representation of prosodic structure: Evidence from English-speakers’ weak syllable productions. Journal of Memory and Language 33, 19–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gerken, L. A. (1996). Prosodic structure in young children's language production. Language 72, 683–712.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goad, H. & Buckley, M. (2006). Prosodic structure in child French: Evidence for the Foot. Catalan Journal of Linguistics 5, 109–42. Special issue on the acquisition of Romance languages as first languages.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hilaire, G., Régol, V. & Jisa, H. (2002). Développement morpho-phonologique de deux enfants en train d'acquérir le français après un implant cochléaire. XXIVèmes Journées d'Etude sur la Parole, Nancy, 24–27 juin.Google Scholar
Jakubowicz, C. & Nash, L. (2001). Functional categories and syntactic operations in (ab)normal language acquisition. Brain and Language 77, 321–39.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Jun, S.-A. & Fougeron, C. (2000). A phonological model of French intonation. In Botinis, A. (ed.), Intonation: Analysis, modeling and technology. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 209–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kern, S. (2003). Le compte-rendu parental au service de l’évaluation de la production lexicale des enfants français entre 16 et 30 mois langage en emergence. Glossa 85, 48–61.Google Scholar
Kupisch, T. (2004). The acquisition of determiners in bilingual German-Italian and German-French children. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Universität Hamburg.Google Scholar
Lleó, C. & Demuth, K. (1999). Prosodic constraints on the emergence of grammatical morphemes: Crosslinguistic evidence from Germanic and Romance languages. In Greenhill, A., Littlefield, H. & Tano, C. (eds), Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press. pp. 407–18.Google Scholar
MacWhinney, B. (2000). The CHILDES Project: Tools for analyzing talk. 3rd Edition. Vol 2: The Database. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Marshall, C. (2004). The morpho-phonological interface in Grammatical-Specific Language Impairment. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of London.Google Scholar
Mertens, P. (1993). Accentuation, intonation, et morphosyntaxe. Travaux de linguistique 26, 21–69.Google Scholar
Montreuil, J.-P. (2002). Vestigial Feet in French. Proceedings of the 2002 Texas Linguistic Society Conference on Stress in Optimality Theory. The University of Texas at Austin.Google Scholar
Nespor, M. & Vogel, I. (1986). Prosodic phonology. Dordrecht: Foris.Google Scholar
Peters, A. (1983). The units of language acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Peters, A. & Menn, L. (1993). False starts and filler syllables: Ways to learn grammatical morphemes. Language 69, 742–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Plunkett, B. (2002). Null subjects in child French interrogatives: A view from the York Corpus. In Pusch, C. D. & Raible, W. (eds), Romanistische Korpuslinguistik: Korpora und gesprochene Sprache/Romance Corpus Linguistics: Corpora and Spoken Language. Tübingen: Narr. pp. 441–52.Google Scholar
Rose, Y. (2000). Headedness and prosodic licensing in the L1 acquisition of phonology. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, McGill University.Google Scholar
Scullen, M. E. (1997). French prosodic morphology: A unified account. Bloomington: Indiana University Linguistics Club.Google Scholar
Selkirk, E. (1978). The French foot: on the status of the mute e. Studies in French Linguistics 1, 141–50.Google Scholar
Selkirk, E. (1984). Phonology and syntax: The relation between sound and structure. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Selkirk, E. (1996). The prosodic structure of function words. In Morgan, J. & Demuth, K. (eds), Signal to syntax: Bootstrapping from speech to grammar in early acquisition. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. pp. 187–213.Google Scholar
Song, J. Y. & Demuth, K. (in preparation). Effects of syllable structure complexity on children's production of English word-final grammatical morphemes.Google Scholar
Tremblay, A. (2005). On the status of determiner fillers in early French: What the child knows. In Brugos, A., Clark-Cotton, M. R. & Ha, S. (eds), Proceedings of the 29th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press. pp. 604–15.Google Scholar
Tremblay, A. (2006). Prosodic constraints on the production of grammatical morphemes in French: The case of determiners. In Deen, K., Nomura, J., Schulz, B. & Schwartz, B. D. (eds), The Proceedings of the Inaugural Conference on Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition – North America, Honolulu, HI. University of Connecticut Occasional Papers in Linguistics 4, 377–88.Google Scholar
Veneziano, E. & Sinclair, H. (2000). The changing status of “filler syllables” on the way to grammatical morphemes. Journal of Child Language 27, 461–500.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Vihman, M., DePaolis, R. & Davis, B. (1998). Is there a ‘trochaic bias’ in early word learning? Evidence from infant production in English and French. Child Development 69, 935–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vihman, M. & McCune, L. (1994). When is a word a word? Journal of Child Language 21, 517–42.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Zapf, J. (2004). Frequency in the input and children's mastery of the regular English plural. In Brugos, A., Micciulla, L. & Smith, C. E. (eds), Proceedings of the 28th Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 669–80). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar