This paper is about referents' introduction in narrative discourse by normal and language-impaired children (SLI children). It focuses on the linguistic devices used by these two populations to introduce new referents while telling a story to informed and non-informed adult interlocutor. The informed one knows the story, the second doesn't. Depending on shared knowledge between the participants, introductions are considered as appropriate or not. We present here the first results of a research program about developmental pragmatics. They show that non appropriate introductions are more frequent with the non informed adult for both populations. Nevertheless appropriate and non appropriate introductions are not done in the same way and in the same proportions by the two groups, the SLI children produce more non appropriate introductions, they may omit referents or determinants and their development is slower and limited compared to the development of normal children. The differences between the two types of children seem to be quantitative, qualitative and developmental.
It is now generally admitted, following Lambrecht (1994), that word order in French is constrained by topicality and shared knowledge between speakers rather than defined by a strict SVO order. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to study how French-speaking children take into account the shared knowledge with the adult using syntactic constructions to introduce referents in narratives, the so-called global marking of information (Hickmann, 2003; Hickmann et al., 1996). The data were taken from a European research project1. The population of the study was composed of normal-speaking children, from 4 to 11 years of age, and of language-impaired children, from 6 to 11 years of age. We show here that, like local marking, the global marking of information is a late acquisition. Furthermore, syntactic constructions, such as il y a ('there is'), are not only involved in information structure but are engaged in discourse planning and constrained by the type of referent introduced. Moreover, we find that language-impaired children (SLI) use different syntactic devices to introduce referents in discourse.
This paper is concerned with some aspects of cohesion in dialogic discourse involving four 13 years-old teenagers affected by specific language impairment (S.L.I.). We describe here how a referent is introduced in their discourse and the means by which something is predicated about it afterwards. That is to say, we are exploring how a referent becomes topic, understanding the notion of topic in terms of «aboutness» (Reinhart, 1981; Lambrecht, 1994). Thereby, we pay special attention to a specific syntactic construction, the French presentative cleft construction il y a...qui.
Most researches on specific language impairment share a structural approach (Leonard, 1998; Jakubowicz, 1999). Studies on language impairment emanating from a discourse perspective are predominantly concerned with narrative productions (de Weck, 1996, 2003; Liles, 1996). Very few studies deal with dialogic productions. This kind of data, however, provides new insights into language pathology.
This study shows that S.L.I. productions reveal a general mastery of pragmatic, informational constraints while still showing a certain number of pragmatic particularities: at moments, the S.L.I. teenagers omit re ferential expressions, they produce non- canonical forms of the presentative cleft construction investigated here and they sometimes seem to use this construction in particular ways.
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