Language, Interaction and Acquisition - Volume 5, Issue 1, 2014

Because of its syntactic, semantic and cognitive complexity, the French morphology for tense, aspect and modality is acquired slowly and gradually by children, from the moment they are born until their adolescence. The least frequent forms in adult language are acquired later. In order to understand how these forms are memorized, handled and produced by children in dialogue, we focus our study on the use of a rare form: the French conditional. We present two French children’s first uses of verbal constructions in the conditional between the ages of 1;00 and 6;11. Four periods can be distinguished during the acquisition process beginning with the production of a unique form with a stable function and ending with the use of different forms with a variety of functions. Adult language plays a very different role depending on the child’s age. After a period during which the children replicate the most frequent adult forms, both children construct different forms with various functions in a more creative manner with occasional non-standard productions. The adult form/function associations are finally reactivated and non-standard forms progressively disappear from the data.

The study analyzes the relationship between the temporal terms used by four-year-old children from different socio-economic backgrounds — marginalized urban neighborhoods and middle-income families — and the use of these terms in the spontaneous situations in which they participate in family and community contexts. The analysis assumes that the child develops knowledge about temporal expressions as they are used by others and as the child uses them herself (Nelson 2007; Tomasello 2003). Findings show that children from marginalized urban neighborhoods use fewer temporal terms than children from middle-income backgrounds. These differences correlate with differences in the input of both groups. The analysis shows differences in the interactional and discursive patterns of use of the terms in the homes of both groups of children.

The present study examines input–output relations in the emergence of verbal affixes that mark modal distinctions in Turkish, a morphologically rich language. Longitudinal naturalistic speech data were analyzed from two girls between ages 1;3–2;6 and their caregivers. Four stages of development were identified. Significant associations between verb inflection and modal notion, observed to be stable across the stages in the input, were noted to develop gradually in the children’s speech. Order of emergence of modal inflections was found to be related to input frequency and transparency of inflectional types, whereas development of inflectional paradigms was observed to be related to inflectional diversity. Conceptual accessibility and pragmatic relevance of the modal notions were considered as child-related factors in this development.

Usage-based studies of morphological development have provided robust evidence of the relevance of local root/inflection combinations for children’s detection of morphological patterns. This paper shows that dialogical continuity is supported by interlocutors’ use of the same lexical verb, presenting children with neighboring morphological forms of the verb, thereby providing an additional source of information on inflectional contrasts. The most prominent neighboring patterns of verb morphology found in Mexican Spanish interactions involve person inflection; first and second person forms reveal sequential complementarity while third person forms employ the continuous use of same form by interlocutors. These conversational sequences constitute the context in which children apply their pattern-finding abilities. Children may participate and work on this aspect from the age of two onwards.

This article proposes to study the acquisition of the placement of attributive adjectives by French-speaking children between the ages of 3;9 and 4;6. It examines the possibility to account for children’s uses and evolution on the basis of the model provided by the input, considering that there is a mismatch between speakers’ abstract knowledge of alternation and their behaviour in usage. The study consists of a comparison between the productions of three children at two points in their development, and the uses of their interlocutors, in situations of games. Results show that alternation appears late and develops slowly in children’s productions, suggesting a very long process of acquisition. They also indicate that children heavily rely on the input in their choices of placement, which influences how they come to master alternation. This supports a usage-based approach to the acquisition of word order and of the Adjective category.

Research findings indicate that synchrony between events in two different modalities is a key concept in early social learning. Our longitudinal pilot study with 14 mother–child dyads is the first to support the idea that synchrony between action and language as a form of responsive behaviour in mothers relates to later language acquisition in their children. We conducted a fine-grained coding of multimodal behaviour within the dyad during an everyday diapering activity when the children were three and six months old. When the children attained 24 months, their mothers completed language surveys; this data was then related to the dyadic measures in early interaction. We propose a ‘role-switching’ model according to which it is important for three-month-olds to be exposed to multimodal input for a great deal of time, whereas for six-month-old infants, the mother should respond to the infant’s attention and provide multimodal input when her child is gazing at her.