Language, Interaction and Acquisition - Volume 2, Issue 1, 2011

The last twenty years have witnessed the development of promising methodologies and new paradigms that have brought substantial findings and have changed our views on early language acquisition. Focusing on early comprehension, this article is mainly devoted to a review of these new paradigms analyzing their benefits and limits. One of the main challenges is the development of reliable on-line behavioural methods coupled with neurophysiological data in cross-sectional and longitudinal studies. Another challenge is the extension of these new paradigms within a powerful crosslinguistic perspective. In the second part of the article, we focus on some advances in different domains directly linked to new methodologies: the evaluation of task dependence in early syntactic comprehension, some new insights on production/comprehension asymmetries and the predictive value of speed of processing language in two-year-olds for language and cognitive abilities in later childhood.

In many languages, noun determiner acquisition is a central aspect of the emergence of grammar in children. The study compares the development of determiners — between one and three years of age — in the spontaneous productions of two children who acquire French and Austrian German, respectively. Starting with the contrast between Romance and Germanic languages and focusing on morphosyntactic factors, it evaluates the impact of typological and language-specific differences on determiner acquisition. We examine the prediction that determiners should emerge earlier in French than in German and classical hypotheses concerning the pre-eminence of definite over indefinite, masculine over feminine, and singular over plural in the light of developmental data.

This contribution analyzes adaptation between child language and child-directed speech (CDS) during the development of grammaticalization in child language. The study compares developmental trajectories of three children (learning Dutch, Austrian German and French) with the trajectories of the CDS of their caretakers. It takes an exploratory approach to describing patterns of development and variability in specific aspects of language development, such as the relative frequency of one-, two/three- and more-word utterances, noun proportions in vocabulary, and determiner/filler use and omission. The analyses consist of descriptive techniques that can be used to visualize patterns of development, which are transferable to other contexts. The results point to real time, ongoing processes of accommodation that are part of an effective communicative flow.

The acquisition of German noun plurals has been the topic of many studies and of much controversy. This study presents a new method of assessing distributional properties of plural suffix application in German in which the predictability of a given suffix (-s, -(e)n, -e, -er or zero) is calculated according to sonority/gender distributions in actual language use, in our case, in child-directed speech. The relevance of suffix predictability is tested in 140 Viennese children from the age of three to nine years by means of a plural elicitation task. Results show that suffix predictability has an impact on children’s correct and erroneous production of plural suffixes. The results are compatible with a usage-based variant of the single-route view which emphasizes speakers’ preference for local generalizations and the role of neighbourhood density in generalization.

The present study compares (1) monolingual English vs. French adults and children and (2) simultaneous French-English bilingual children who describe caused motion events. The results concerning L1 speakers showed developmental progressions in both languages, e.g., utterance complexity increases with age. However, response patterns differed considerably across languages in that responses were denser and more compact in English than in French. The results concerning bilingual children showed unidirectional crosslinguistic interactions. Responses elicited in English paralleled monolingual developmental patterns, whereas bilinguals’ French productions differed from those of monolingual French peers. The findings suggest that bilingual children transfer lexicalisation patterns from one of their languages to the other when the former provides more transparent means of achieving high semantic density.

Recent research shows that adult speakers of verb- vs. satellite-framed languages (Talmy, 2000) express motion events in language-specific ways in speech (Slobin 1996, 2004) and co-verbal gestures (Duncan 2005; Kita & Özyurek 2003; McNeill 1992). Although such findings suggest cross-linguistic differences in the expression of events, little is still known about their implications for first language acquisition. This paper examines how French and English adults and children (ages four and six) express Path and Manner in speech and gesture when describing voluntary motion presented in animated cartoons. The results show that English adults conflate Manner+Path in speech more often than French adults who frequently talk about Path only. Both groups gesture mainly about Path only, but English adults also conflate Manner+Path into single gestures, whereas French adults never do so. Children in both languages are predominantly adult-like in speech and gesture from age four on, but also display developmental progressions with increasing age. Finally, speech and gestures are predominantly co-expressive in both language groups and at all ages. When modalities differ, English adults typically provide less information in gesture (Path) than in speech (Manner+Path; ‘Manner modulation’ phenomenon), whereas French adults express complementary information in speech (Manner) and gesture (Path). The discussion highlights theoretical implications of such bi-modal analyses for acquisition and gesture studies

This paper examines the development of motion expressions in two Korean children. The database consists of bi-weekly to monthly recordings of spontaneous mother–child interaction in their home between ages 1:11 and 4;2. All expressions of motion, both spontaneous and caused, were analyzed following the coding system developed by Hickmann, Hendriks & Champaud 2009). Analyses include form–function relationships between the types of linguistic devices used and the components of Motion expressed (e.g. Path, Manner, Cause), as well as the semantic density of motion-relevant information within the clause. The results were then compared to those of French and English learners reported in Hickmann et al. (2009).verb-framed