Language, Interaction and Acquisition - Volume 7, Issue 2, 2016

The present study examines the amount of input and output in congenitally hearing-impaired children with a cochlear implant (CI) and normally-hearing children (NH) and their normally-hearing mothers. The aim of the study was threefold: (a) to investigate the input provided by the two groups of mothers, (b) to investigate the output of the two groups of children, and (c) to investigate the influence of the mothers’ input on child output and expressive vocabulary size. Mothers are less influenced by their children’s hearing status than the children are: CI children are more talkative and slower speakers. Mothers influenced their children on most parameters, but strikingly, it was not maternal talkativeness as such, but the number of maternal turns that is the best predictor of a child’s expressive vocabulary size.

In this study we analyzed the verbal and gestural behavior of 6-year-old French children during free dialogue explanation. We expected that children would alter their gestures according to content explained and interlocutor visibility. Thirty children explained two games to a peer: fifteen could not see their interlocutor whereas fifteen could. Results showed that the mean number of clauses per explanation of a child speaker interacting with a child addressee did not significantly change according to content explained or the visibility of the addressee. However, the mean number of gestures per clause is higher for a child speaker interacting with a child addressee both when explaining the spatial game and when face-to-face. Finally, children explaining how to play a spatial game produced more representational gestures and made more interactive gestures when the addressee was visible. These results are discussed in relation to previous studies on children’s language production and acquisition.

English, an international language, is widely taught and learnt as a foreign language in France. However, French learners face pronunciation difficulties, as the two languages differ both on the segmental level (i.e. individual sounds) and on the suprasegmental, prosodic level (i.e. stress, rhythm, intonation). It has been argued that focus on the prosodic features of the target language (L2) would improve learners’ oral skills. Nevertheless, very few studies have brought evidence of the greater role of prosody in the acquisition of a second or foreign language. The current study seeks to address this gap by directly comparing prosody-centred and segment-centred teaching to determine whether one approach is more effective than the other in the improvement of L2 oral perception skills. The study shows that both teaching approaches enabled French EFL learners to improve their perception skills; however, neither method proved to have a stronger impact, suggesting that both segmental and suprasegmental aspects should both be addressed in L2 teaching.

The literature on the mixing of two languages in children bilingual from birth distinguishes code switching on different levels, switching within the same sentence or utterance (‘intra-sentential switching’, ‘intra-utterance switching’ following Genesee, Boivin & Nicoladis, 1996 : 428–429) and mixing between sentences or utterances in the same conversation (‘inter-sentential switching’, ‘inter-utterance switching’). This article presents a longitudinal study on inter-sentential switching, still rarely investigated, in four bilingual French-German children between the age of two and four years. The main goal is to detect the characteristics of such switching, to increase our understanding as to whether they are comparable to intra-sentential switching in terms of frequency and motivation. Inter-sentential switching is much more frequent than intra-sentential switching. Analysis of the data shows that inter-sentential switching is frequent in the weaker language of children classified as imbalanced bilinguals during the study. In contrast, inter-sentential switching is nearly absent in children who are balanced bilinguals. Results also show that inter-sentential switching does not generally follow the characteristics of code-switching, but rather depends on emotional and cognitive factors.