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

Gestes, verbalisations et combinaisons bimodales dans les productions d’enfants français âgés de 18 mois à 4 ans et demi

Dans le présent article, nous étudions les productions langagières de jeunes enfants français en situation de jeu quasi naturelle avec un adulte. Nous savons que les enfants âgés de 17 à 41 mois qui commencent à mobiliser leurs ressources verbales produisent des combinaisons geste-mot. Le rôle de ces combinaisons bimodales a déjà été bien étudié chez les enfants italiens et américains mais ce n’était pas encore le cas chez l’enfant français.Notre premier objectif est donc d’analyser les productions langagières verbales, gestuelles et bimodales d’enfants français pour vérifier qu’on y retrouve bien les évolutions constatées ailleurs. Notre deuxième objectif consiste à réfléchir à une représentation du développement langagier précoce qui, à la différence d’indices telles la LME, prenne en compte l’ensemble des productions gestuelles, bimodales et verbales des jeunes enfants. À cette fin, nous proposons une analyse qui met sur le même plan gestualité et verbalisations, ainsi que l’ébauche d’un modèle bimodal qui reste à affiner par la suite.The current study focuses on language production in young French children during a free play session with an adult. Children aged 17 to 41 months beginning to develop speech also produce gesture-word combinations. Although the role of these bimodal combinations has been well studied for Italian and American children, little is known about these combinations in young French children.Our first goal is to analyse the verbal, gestural and bimodal language production of French children and verify that the changes which have been found for Italian and American are similar for French. Our second goal is to go beyond structural description of early language acquisition such as MLU types of description, integrating gestural and bimodal aspects of communication. Our proposal is to present a description of language behaviour based on all its aspects, and suggesting a tentative bimodal model that needs to be refined in our future work

Conduites narratives et Theorie de l'esprit chez des enfants dysphasiques: Les effets de deux méthodes d'intervention

The purpose of this study is to assess the evaluative component of narratives produced by 20 children with SLI aged 9 to 10 years and six months through two intervention procedures. After spontaneously telling their first version of a story of a misunderstanding between two characters, constructed on the basis of a sequence of five images (e.g. Veneziano and Hudelot, 2006), children participated in a scaffolding procedure during which they were questioned about the reasons for the events (Conversational procedure). Children were then asked to retell the story. The second procedure consists in retelling the story after hearing a "model" story. Results show that the evaluative component and the global coherence of the narrative increase significantly in SLI children after the intervention procedures, with better performances obtained after the Model procedure. Furthermore, the positive effects obtained after the two interventions remain stable one week later. These results show the necessity of evaluating SLI children's narrative skills in a varied and multidimensional way, as well as the interest of Theory of Mind in this assessment. They also stimulate clinicians and educators to apply these intervention procedures in their everyday practices.Cette étude porte sur la composante " évaluative " des récits produits par 20 enfants dysphasiques âgés de 9 ans à 10 ans 1⁄2 et sur l'effet de deux procédures d'intervention sur l'expression de cette composante. Les récits des enfants sont construits à partir d'une séquence de cinq images qui " racontent " l'histoire d'un malentendu entre deux personnages (Veneziano et Hudelot, 2006). Après avoir produit spontanément un premier récit, les enfants le racontent une deuxième fois, soit après avoir été questionnés sur les raisons des événements (procédure Conversation sur les causes - CosCau), soit après avoir entendu l'histoire racontée par l'expérimentateur (procédure de type Modèle-Mod), soit encore après avoir joué à un jeu de " mémoire " avec les images de l'histoire (procédure contrôle-Con). Les résultats montrent que la composante évaluative et la cohérence globale du récit augmentent significativement quelles que soient les procédures, avec un avantage pour l'intervention de type Modèle. De plus, les effets positifs obtenus immédiatement après l'inter- vention sont maintenus après une semaine. Ces résultats indiquent clairement la nécessité d'évaluer les compétences narratives des enfants dysphasiques de manière variée et multidimensionnelle ainsi que l'intérêt de la théorie de l'esprit pour rendre compte de cette évaluation. Enfin, ces résultats inci- tent à appliquer ces méthodes d'intervention sur le terrain

A role for lipid rafts in the protection afforded by docosahexaenoic acid against ethanol toxicity in primary rat hepatocytes.

International audience: Previously, we demonstrated that eicosapentaenoic acid enhanced ethanol-induced oxidative stress and cell death in primary rat hepatocytes via an increase in membrane fluidity and lipid raft clustering. In this context, another n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acid, docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), was tested with a special emphasis on physical and chemical alteration of lipid rafts. Pretreatment of hepatocytes with DHA reduced significantly ethanol-induced oxidative stress and cell death. DHA protection could be related to an alteration of lipid rafts. Indeed, rafts exhibited a marked increase in membrane fluidity and packing defects leading to the exclusion of a raft protein marker, flotillin. Furthermore, DHA strongly inhibited disulfide bridge formation, even in control cells, thus suggesting a disruption of protein-protein interactions inside lipid rafts. This particular spatial organization of lipid rafts due to DHA subsequently prevented the ethanol-induced lipid raft clustering. Such a prevention was then responsible for the inhibition of phospholipase C-γ translocation into rafts, and consequently of both lysosome accumulation and elevation in cellular low-molecular-weight iron content, a prooxidant factor. In total, the present study suggests that DHA supplementation could represent a new preventive approach for patients with alcoholic liver disease based upon modulation of the membrane structures

Productive use of syntactic categories in typical young French children

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Etude des productions langagières d'enfants âgés de 17 à 41 mois et issus de quartiers défavorisés : Evaluation des capacités langagières des sujets selon l'âge.

The current study focuses on language production in young French children during a free play session with an adult. Children aged 17 to 41 months who start using speech produce a lot of gesture-word combinations. The role of those multimodal combinations has been studied for Italian and English children but we know very little about the bimodal communication of young French children. Our first goal is to analyse the verbal, gestural and bimodal language production of French children and investigate the role played by gesture-word combinations in language development. Our second goal is to observe the verbal production according to age and to an index of general syntactic use: the mean length of utterance (MLU). Results do not support the existence of a “two-word speech period” and show that age is not a good predictor of language development for children with low socio-cultural level.Le présent document se concentre sur l'analyse des productions langagières de jeunes enfants français pendant un session de jeu avec un adulte. Les enfants âgés de 17 à 41 mois qui commencent à utiliser le langage produisent une grande quantité de combinaisons geste-mot. Le rôle de ces combinaisons multimodales a été très étudié chez l'enfant américain et l'anfant italien mais nous en savons encore très peu de leur utilisation chez l'enfant français. Dans un premier temps, nous allons analyser les production verbales, gestuelles et bimodales d'enfants français et analyser le rôle des combinaisons bimodales dans leur développement langagier. Ensuite nous observerons leur productions purement verbales en fonction de l'âge et en fonction de la longueur moyenne de leurs énoncés. NOs résultats mettent clairement en doute l'existence d'un "stade deux mots" et montre que l'âge n'est pas une indice suffisant pour prédire le développement langagier des enfants défavorisés

Suivi du langage d’enfants bilingues issus de milieux sociaux défavorisés : Enjeux cliniques, pédagogiques et sociaux

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Prosodie et acquisition du langage chez les enfants implantés cochléaires

L'acquisition tardive du langage dans sa composanteprosodique a été examinée, à six ans post implant, chezcinq locuteurs enfants sourds profonds prélinguaux,implantés entre 26 et 60 mois. Leurs productionsspontanées ont été comparées en fonction de leur âged'implantation afin de mieux comprendre lesmécanismes de plasticité cérébrale pour les opérationslangagières. Les enregistrements ont eu lieu dans troiscentres d'implantation1 (Paris, Montpellier etToulouse). Les résultats mettent en lumière desperturbations rythmiques persistantes chez tous lesenfants mais significativement plus importantes dans legroupe d'enfants implantés à 45 et 60 mois que dans legroupe d'enfants implantés à 26, 27 et 37 mois

Early grammar‐building in French‐speaking deaf children with cochlear implants: A follow‐up corpus study

International audienceAbstract Background One of the most consistent findings reported in the paediatric cochlear implant (CI) literature is the heterogeneity of language performance observed more in grammatical morphology than in lexicon or pragmatics. As most of the corpus studies addressing these issues have been conducted in English, it is unclear whether their results can be generalized to other languages. In particular, little is known about languages known for their grammatical complexity, such as French. Aims The aim of this corpus study was to compare the productive use of function words (FWs) and some agreement features (AGRs) in children with CIs and children with typical development (TD) matched for mean length of utterance in words (MLU words ), a general index of grammatical complexity, and auditory experience, as measured by hearing age (HA) and chronological age (CA), respectively. Methods & Procedures Natural speech samples from 116 monolingual French‐speaking children, including 40 children with CIs followed longitudinally and 76 TD children, were collected. FWs and AGRs were analysed using a Part of Speech Tagger (POS‐T) from the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES). Outcomes & Results The two groups differed by 3 years for HA and CA. No effect of family socio‐economic status (SES) was found in the CI group. Stepwise regression analyses showed that the two groups did not share the same predictors of MLU words : plurals and determiners predicted MLU words in children with CIs, at 2 and 3 years of HA, whereas feminine markers and subject‐pronouns were found to best predict MLU words in TD children at 2 and 3 years of CA. Structural equation models (SEMs), a combination of confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and path analysis, yielded a different hierarchical structure of grammatical relations (GRs). Selective difficulties affecting verbal clitics and other pronominal forms were found specifically in the CI group (object‐pronouns, reflexive, relative and past participles). Dependency grammar analysis confirmed these contrasting developmental profiles in multiword utterances, such as preposition/nouns, subject/verbs, and verb/determiner/nouns. Conclusions & Implications Atypical grammatical patterns in children with CIs reflect a specific architecture of syntactic dependencies of FWs underpinning morphological complexity and syntactic connectivity. Clinical implications are discussed for assessment and intervention planning. What This Paper Adds What is already known on this subject The productive use of FWs has been identified as a particular area of weakness in children with CIs compared with TD children. In addition, heterogenous grammatical performance has often been found after 1–3 years of CI use, regardless of demographic factors such as age at implantation, duration of deafness or SES. What this paper adds to existing knowledge Assessing the early building of FWs and AGRs in children with CIs helps to understand the syntactic complexity and hierarchical structure of their language. Since most corpus studies on grammatical morphology have been conducted in English, it is not clear whether their difficulties can be generalized to other languages. The French language has a system of FWs and inflections that determine the morphophonological properties of nominal and verbal forms. Early grammar learning in children with CIs born with profound deafness were compared with the two groups of TD children matched both for duration of auditory experience (i.e., HA of CI children, CA of TD children) and for MLU words . We found a similar profile between groups at 2 years but not at 3 years for HA and CA. The two groups do not share the same predictors of MLU words : namely, plurals and determiners for CI children versus feminine markers and subject pronouns for TD children. They show a different syntactic organization of GRs. Children with CIs struggle with selective difficulties affecting verbal clitics and pronominal forms (object‐pronouns, reflexive, relative and past participles). Consistent with theories of morphophonological richness and syntactic connectivity, our results support the distributional learning hypothesis of language acquisition that infants and toddlers are sensitive to FWs and AGRs at an early age. Specific components of syntactic organization are disrupted in children with CIs. What are the potential or actual clinical implications of this work? This work has potential clinical implications because it unravels the limitations of morphophonological processing in children with CIs. Its results highlight a specific difficulty in learning FWs and AGRs in a verbal inflectional morphology context