The unfolding of the verbal temporal system in French children's speech between 18 and 36 months

Abstract

<jats:title>ABSTRACT</jats:title><jats:p>In this paper, our aim is to analyze the relationship between the development of verbal forms and verbal functions. We examine all verbal forms produced longitudinally by two French children in terms of their morphosyntactic marking of tense, aspect, mood and situation type, and compare them to their contextually interpreted meanings. We introduce the main issues relevant to the unfolding of the verbal temporal system in children's data. Our data consists in two longitudinal corpora of French speaking children aged 1;06 to 3;01. The paper focuses on: 1) the relationship between form and function within the verbal system in the earlier stage of development; 2) the children's ability to mark a displacement between speech time and event time.</jats:p>

Complexity markers in morphosyntactic productions in French-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI)

“…The second most frequent verbal category in the spontaneous language of TDL children contains past participle forms. These forms represent 10 to 25% of the spontaneous language of French-speaking TDL children (Parisse & Morgenstern, 2012). Our results suggest that this category is mastered by school-age children with SLI and also corroborates the usage-based theory account.…”

“…Differences between groups emerge in the less frequent categories. In rare forms such as the imperfect, future or conditional, which account for only 5% of spontaneous language (Parisse & Morgenstern, 2012), or modals as already observed by previous studies (Conti-Ramsden & Rice & Bode, 1993), the groups differ both in occurrence and variability. These complex verbal forms appear later in typically developing language and could be interesting markers of morphosyntactic difficulties in children with SLI.…”

“…Concerning the frequent forms, the two groups performed similarly for the production of verbs in the present and imperative both in quantity (token) and variability (type). The most frequent forms in spontaneous language of the TDL group were the present and imperative forms, which are the shortest verbal forms in French (Parisse & Morgenstern, 2012).…”

“…Indeed, as these markers are sufficiently automated by children with SLI, we predict no difference between the two groups. According to the developmental acquisition in children with TDL (Parisse & Morgenstern, 2012), we predict group differences on the rarest markers (less than 5% in spontaneous speech), such as the infrequent category of imperfect, future, and conditional forms.…”

7. Children’s Multimodal Language Development

“…The pace of acquisition is considered as being governed by a combination of factors, including syntactic, semantic and cognitive complexity, as well as the frequency of the forms in the input. However, children appear to be able to refer to past, present, future, and to different aspectual meanings, from quite an early age, but in order to observe this, it is necessary to go beyond language forms and to pay attention to communicative meaning (Parisse/Morgenstern 2012). Children's productions are interpreted in context as referring to complex events and a variety of temporal realities and situation types from very early on.…”