On-line grammaticality judgments in French children and adults: a crosslinguistic perspective

Abstract

This study examined the on-line processing of French sentences in a grammaticality judgment experiment. Three age groups of French children (mean age: 6;8, 8;6 and 10;10 years) and a group of adults were asked to detect grammatical violations as quickly as possible. Three factors were studied: the violation type: agreement violations (number and gender) vs. word order violations; the violation position: early vs. late in the sentence; the target type of the violations: intra vs. interphrasal. An example of an early interphrasal verbal agreement violation follows: ‘Chaque semaine la voisine remplissent le frigo après avoir fait les courses au marché’ (Every week the neighbour fill the fridge after shopping at the market). The main developmental results were the following: not surprisingly, children were always slower than adults in the detection of grammatical violations. At each age level, morphological violations were more rapidly detected than word order violations. Each age group was faster at judging sentences with later occurring violations and the position effect was especially strong in the youngest groups. Finally, intraphrasal violations were more rapidly detected than interphrasal ones, this effect being observed only in the oldest groups (i.e. 10;10 years and adults). The results were compared to previous on-line data obtained in modern Greek (Kail & Diakogiorgi, 1998) showing strong similarities, even though Greek is a very rich morphological language. These results are discussed within the framework of the Competition Model, outlining the necessity to incorporate new processing constraints into the model.

Grammaticality judgments in children: The role of age, working memory and phonological ability

“…While not necessarily at adult levels, grammaticality judgment of these types of word order errors was better than other constructions that were tested in these studies such as omission of determiners or auxiliaries, or agreement errors. While intraphrasal word order violations were easy to detect, a study conducted in French, a freer word order language than English, found that children had much more difficulty detecting interphrasal word order errors (Kail, 2004). We test interphrasal word order violations in the current study, but given the stricter word order of English, may still find children are fairly good at detecting these types of errors.…”

“…deVilliers & deVilliers, 1972). Tests on older children showed that they were able to do the task but that grammaticality judgment performance differed by construction type (Hakes, 1980 ;Sutter & Johnson, 1990;Wulfeck, 1993 ;Kail, 2004 ;Wulfeck, Bates, Krupa-Kwiatkowski & Saltzman, 2004). Although most studies have only tested a small subset of constructions, looking across studies it is possible to piece together a rough order of construction difficulty for children performing grammaticality judgments.…”

Maturation of the Language Network: From Inter- to Intrahemispheric Connectivities

“…In adults, the left IFS has been shown to support aspects of working memory and to interact strongly with BA 44 during the processing of syntactically complex sentences [18]. In children, working memory capacities are taken as being crucial for success in dealing with complex syntax [53]. Therefore, the functional involvement of the IFS as part of a network processing complex sentences may be an important step towards the maturity of the default language network.…”

On-line sentence processing in Swedish: cross-linguistic developmental comparisons with French

“…The purpose of this study was to provide more developmental data on the on-line integration of two basic grammatical constraints, word order configuration and morphological agreement in Swedish, and to compare these processes with previous data obtained in French (Kail, 2004), a typologically contrasted language. Swedish is a Germanic language belonging to the Scandinavian branch of Indo-European languages such as Danish, Norwegian and Icelandic.…”

“…analysis with French (Kail, 2004) underlines the developmental processing abilities and the interdependence between cue cost and cue validity.…”