Le genre grammatical (représentations et traitements cognitifs)

Quelle que soit la langue, le genre grammatical représente une façon classique de catégoriser les mots contenus dans notre lexique mental. Mais parallèlement à cette constatation, certains points sont sujets à variation en fonction du système langagier étudié, tels que la modularité du nombre de classes, les critères d'assignation ou les règles d'accords régissant la structuration grammaticale des phrases. Le genre grammatical est donc une particularité linguistique omniprésente et complexe, mais dont les mécanismes cognitifs d'accès et de traitement restent peu connus, car peu étudiés. Nous avons donc exploré, au cours de ce travail de thèse, le rôle de l'information de genre lors des processus de production et de reconnaissance des mots. Plus précisément, nous nous sommes focalisés sur la dimension temporelle de son intégration dans les deux modalités. Pour cela nous avons exploré le degré d'implication du genre et à quel niveau temporel il était extrait lors du mécanisme de sélection des déterminants : (1) quand est-ce que sont récupérées les informations phonologiques et de genre lors de la sélection des articles en français en production et en compréhension ; (2) lors de la reconnaissance visuelle des mots, à quel instant du processus d'accès au lexique interviennent les informations de genre grammatical. Les réponses obtenues via les différents protocoles menés (décision lexicale, décision de genre, catégorisation phonologique, etc.) nous ont conduits à reconsidérer certaines hypothèses de fonctionnement en production, ainsi que d'offrir un premier modèle exhaustif des divers processus impliqués lors de la récupération du genre en compréhension.LYON2/BRON-BU (690292101) / SudocSudocFranceF

Children's enrichments of conjunctive sentences in context

International audienceAn utterance conjoining two propositions with and often conveys more information than the sum of its parts. Consider how a truth-table analysis would show that Mary got pregnant and got married is equivalent to Mary got pregnant and got married; in conversation, the order of the two conjuncts matters much more. We present three experiments that investigate both the development and on-line processing of pragmatic enrichments linked to and by presenting story-vignettes, each concerning a short series of events, to ten-year-olds and adults. Critical were two types of a comprehension question: One that conjoined two events in their order of appearance and one that inverted the two events. Results show that (a) children are generally more likely than adults to respond affirmatively to invertedorder questions; b) as events are made more salient in the story, children's pragmatic enrichments in response to the test-questions increase and; (c) inverted-order questions are linked with extra reading time for both children and adults, but not necessarily for the same reason. These data are taken to show that and sentences are initially processed among children in a minimal fashion and that developmental effects reflect how pragmatic enrichments as well as metalinguistic analyses require further effort in processing these sentences

Linguisticpragmatic factors in interpreting disjunctions

The connective or can be treated as an inclusive disjunction or else as an exclusive disjunction. Though researchers are aware of this distinction, few have examined the conditions under which each interpretation should be anticipated. Based on linguistic-pragmatic analyses, we assume that interpretations are initially inclusive before either a) remaining so, or; b) becoming exclusive by way of an implicature (but not both). We point to a class of situations that ought to predispose disjunctions to inclusive interpretations and to situations that encourage exclusive interpretations. A disjunction's ultimate interpretation is based on its potential informativeness, where the interpretation of the disjunctive utterance having the smallest number of true conditions is considered most informative. Our investigation leads to five experiments employing arbitrary materials. Among the problems expected to encourage inclusive interpretations are those that present disjunctions in the antecedents of conditionals and in question forms. The best candidates to produce implicatures are those disjunctions that underdetermine an expected conjunctive conclusion, though other disjunctive utterances that are more informative as exclusive are discussed and tested. Linguistic-pragmatic factors in interpreting disjunction