We report on our analysis of talk during an assessment task where we asked children living in northern Canadian communities to draw and write about activities they share with family and friends in their daily lives. We introduce a language as context approach to assessing young children's (ages 4-6 years) literacy and sociocultural knowledge,…

This study presents the first investigation of the development of possessive constructions in Northern East Cree, a polysynthetic language indigenous to Canada. It examines transcripts from naturalistic recording sessions involving one adult and one child, from age 2;01.12 to 3;08.24. Findings reveal that, despite the frequency of possessive…

With the goal of developing culturally appropriate approaches for assessing and supporting children's language use, teachers of 4-to 6-year-old children in northern Canadian rural and Indigenous communities are involved in a 6-year collaborative action research project. Teachers video record children's interactions during dramatic and construction…

This study examines the incidence and character of conditional statements ("if...then") in the spontaneous speech of young children. Twenty-four pairs of siblings, ranging in age from 2.1 years to 7.3 years, were observed and recorded while interacting in their homes for a period of 1 hour. Sixty-nine statements including "if"…

With particular attention to the use of questions and the maintenance of topics, the classroom discussion of kindergarten children and their teacher during a storybook lesson was analyzed to determine how conversational control is maintained and what rules of conversation might apply in the classroom. A transcript for discourse analysis was…

The data for the study were gathered in the course of a larger sociolinguistic survey carried out among francophones from Welland and Sudbury, Ontario. Among other things, the acquisition of spoken English by bilingual francophone students from these cities was studied in depth, using error analysis. The present study attempts to show that in a…

This paper analyzes spoken usage of English prepositions by two groups of Ontarian elementary students at the Grade 2 and Grade 5 levels. The first group (29 subjects) consists of bilingual Franco-Ontarian students from Welland and Sudbury. The second group (8 subjects) is composed of monolingual English students from Toronto. Examination of the…

Examined whether there is an earlier developmental stage than 2 years of age when bilingual children do not use their languages in pragmatically differentiated ways. Analyses of recordings of four French-English bilingual children in Canada during free play sessions with their mothers and fathers suggest a stage very early in development when…

Essays on lexicon and vocabulary development, all in French, address these topics: bilingual lexicon in the context of translation; lexical and conceptual representation in bilinguals; pronouns in "existential" constructions in French and English; configurational functions within grammar; Gustaf Stern's diachronic semantic schema; the…

The 33 papers, all in French, from the 1996 conference on research in linguistics address a wide range of topics in linguistics, including: linguists as an endangered species; categorizing verb specifiers in Yoruba; socio-terminology as a framework for understanding the language of orthodontia; French-to-Arabic borrowings in the 19th and 20th…