The acquisition of pronouns by French children: A parallel study of production and comprehension

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 proces

Neuropsychologie développementale et dyslexie

Dans ce bref article, la dyslexie développementale est discutée dans le cadre plus large de la neuropsychologie développementale. La problématique de la définition de ce trouble est tout d’abord envisagée et quelques questions relatives à cette définition sont soulevées. Les diverses hypothèses explicatives sont ensuite brièvement rappelées, et le rôle prépondérant joué par la phonologie dans la dyslexie est souligné en référence à des données issues de la génétique, de l’imagerie cérébrale et de la psychologie cognitive. La question des troubles associés est ensuite abordée. En conclusion, nous tirons quelques implications cliniques des connaissances scientifiques actuelles sur la prévention, l’évaluation et la prise en charge de la dyslexie