Simple principles for a complex output: An experiment in early syntactic development

A set of iterative mechanisms, the Three-Step Algorithm, is proposed to account for the burst in the syntactic capacities of children over age two. These mechanisms are based on the children’s perception, memory, elementary rule-like behavior and cognitive capacities, and do not require any specific innate grammatical capacities. The relevance of the Three-Step Algorithm is tested, using the large Manchester corpus in the CHILDES database. The results show that 80% of the utterances can be exactly reconstructed and that, when incomplete reconstructions are taken into account, 94% of all utterances are reconstructed. The Three-Step Algorithm should be followed by the progressive acquisition of syntactic categories and use of slot-and-frame structures which lead to a greater and more complex linguistic mastery

Beyond the realm of noun and verb: the cognitive lexicon of the young child

Most studies of early lexical development are focused on the acquisition of the noun or verb categories. Only studies targeting the very beginning of word production describe the rich pattern of reference and expressive words produced by very young children. Still, during their second year, children’s production in tokens contains as many words that are not nouns and verbs than words that are. The importance of categories such as communicators, adverbs, pointers and adjectives never decreases, neither in English nor in French children between the age of 1;6 to 2;6. A cross-linguistic comparison shows that the same type of words is the most frequent in English and French children, while a comparison with adult production shows that, in neither language, do the words produced by children match exactly the words they hear most frequently. The difference in the syntactic structure of English and French argues strongly for a cognitive origin to this close match of the children’s words. These words other than nouns and verbs are more complex than they appear, because they cover a whole range of reference principles – direct reference, indirect reference, shared reference, generic reference, multiple reference, ambiguity, similarity, repetition, absence of –, as well as a wide range of expressive meanings. This type of words appears and grows throughout the children’s second year and provides the basic stones for further lexicon and syntax development

Premières formes de conditionnel chez l'enfant

International audienceBecause of its syntactic, semantic and cognitive complexity, children acquire tense marking quite slowly and progressively. The first temporal forms used by French-speaking children are generally the present tense, the past participle and the infinitive. The temporal system then gets richer and starts to include the passé composé to mark the past, the imparfait, the periphrastic future then the inflectional future and finally the conditional and the subjunctive. This paper presents the first uses of the conditional by two French children between the ages of 1;06 and 4;10 and their functions in context.Le marquage des temps s’acquiert lentement et de manière graduelle chez l’enfant en raison de la combinaison de sa complexité syntaxique, sémantique et cognitive. Les premières formes temporelles utilisées par les enfants francophones sont en général le présent, le participe passé et l’infinitif et dans un deuxième temps le système temporel s’enrichit : passé composé marquant l’antériorité, imparfait, futur périphrastique puis futur simple, et enfin subjonctif et conditionnel. Cet article présente les premiers emplois du conditionnel et leurs fonctions en contexte chez deux enfants francophones entre l’âge de 1;06 et 4;10. Les deux enfants utilisent au début du corpus une seule forme pour un seul verbe. Après une période de diversification et de production de formes standard, elles procèdent alors à des essais morphologiques, avec de nouveaux lexèmes verbaux. A la fin de notre corpus, le conditionnel est utilisé de manière diverse et productive, mais ne recouvre pas tous les usages potentiels de la langue française adulte

Codage et interprétation du langage spontané d'enfants de 1 à 3 ans

National audienceTranscription of oral data is a difficult art for it is a complex form of language activity which includes an interpretation process of other people's verbal productions. Ideally, researchers would prefer descriptions free of any interpretation, but this is impossible. A solution would be to follow a clear and simple consensual interpretation process, easily understood by all potential users of the data, using precise and clear coding standards, as unambiguous as possible, as well as linkage between the transcript and the multimedia recordings. This could be completed with an enriched context, both linguistic (phonology, syntax, semantic, pragmatic descriptions) and extra-linguistic (situation, action, descriptions of the surroundings...). In this paper, the technical difficulties of this type of coding are presented within the framework of the transcription process of young children's data. The tools and formats used are those of the CHILDES project with our own additions brought about by the choices we made to face the specific difficulties linked to transcription of child language data.La transcription de corpus de langage oral est un art difficile car c'est une activité langagière. En particulier, elle inclut le processus d'interprétation des propos d'autrui que l'on trouve dans toute interaction langagière. Or ce qu'attend le scientifique est une description des données de langage qui s'affranchirait de cette interprétation, ce qui est impossible. On doit donc chercher à générer un processus d'interprétation simple, consensuel, qui puisse être compris par tout utilisateur d'un corpus. Pour cela, on utilise des normes de codage précises, claires, aussi peu ambiguës que possible, ainsi qu'un alignement sur du matériel sonore ou audiovisuel. On peut aussi accompagner les transcriptions d'un contexte très riche, soit langagier (phonologique, syntaxique, sémantique, pragmatique), soit extra-langagier (situation, actions, description de scène). Ces difficultés techniques sont présentées dans le cas de corpus de jeunes enfants (projet Léonard) qui exemplifie les problèmes de transcription de langage oral. Les outils et formats utilisés sont ceux du projet CHILDES avec des évolutions spécifiques qui reflètent les difficultés que nous avons relevées dans notre travail de corpus et les solutions adoptées

The Paris Corpus

International audienceThe Paris corpus1 was financed by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche, in the context of two research programmes entitled ‘Acquisition du Langage et Grammaticalisation’ (2005–2008, http://anr-leonard.ens-lsh.fr/) and ‘Communi- cation Langagie`re chez le Jeune Enfant’ (CoLaJE, 2009–2012, http://colaje. risc.cnrs.fr). The aim of the two programmes was to collect new French data and add five new longitudinal corpora to the international database of the CHILDES project (http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/, MacWhinney, 2000), improve researchers’ transcrip- tion and coding systems to enable them to study the emergence and development of grammatical patterns used by children between age one and seven, and compare child and adult speech. The programmes brought together specialists from various fields of language acquisition in order to study language development in the same longitudinal corpus from a multimodal and interdisciplinary perspective. The anal- yses aimed to find regularities in acquisition for each child and across the children.For this Special Issue of the Journal of French Language Studies, all the authors were given the video recordings and transcriptions of the same four longitudinal corpora. The researchers chose to analyse either one or several children within the same data set according to their own field of competence

Using the TEI as a pivot format for oral and multimodal language corpora

International audiencePresentation of the work of the GT2 team of the Consortium IRCOM.The goal of the project is to be able to convert classic oral transcription tools in the TEI format

Procedural learning across modalities in French-speaking children with specific language impairment

peer reviewedIt has been suggested that the language problems encountered in specific language impairment (SLI) arise from basal ganglia abnormalities that lead to impaired procedural memory. However, recent serial reaction time (SRT) studies did not reveal any differences between the SLI and typically developing (TD) groups on the measures of procedural memory linked to visual sequence learning. In this paper, 16 children with and without SLI were compared on two versions of SRT tasks: a visual task and an auditory one. The results showed that children with SLI were as fast as their TD peers in both modalities. All of the children obtained similar specific sequence learning indices, indicating that they were able to detect regularities in both modalities. Although children with SLI were as accurate as their TD peers for the visual SRT task, they made more errors than their TD peers in auditory SRT conditions. The results indicate that, in relation to procedural memory, the core of the impairment in SLI is not linked to difficulties in the detection of regularities. We argue that when children with SLI present some difficulties, the children’s weaknesses might depend on the type of processing involved (e.g., tasks involving auditory sequences)

Morphosyntactic disorders as a consequence of categorization difficulty in children with specific language impairment

Peer reviewe