The goal of this study is to investigate the acquisition of causal relations with parce que "because" and temporal relations with quand "when" by children between age 3 and 5. We aim at identifying whether different discourse type, conversation and narration, allow children to use quand and parce que with different semantic…

The relationship between emotion and language in children is an emerging field of research. To carry out this type of study, researchers need to precisely manipulate the emotional parameters of the words in their experimental material. However, the number of affective norms for words in this population is still limited. To fill this gap, the…

We reexamine the distribution of nonfinite root forms (NRFs) in Child French on the basis of two novel spontaneous speech corpora focusing on two issues that have increasingly dominated recent analyses of French on the one hand and NRFs/RIs on the other. First, we argue that the level of NRF production peaking at ~24% is in line with the…

In this corpus study, it is asked whether young children speaking European French build their early syntax around grammatical or lexical words. Specifically, the study examines the relationship of grammatical and lexical words in three types of syntactic structures (determiner--noun, pronoun--verb and subject pronoun--verb). The corpus included…

In teacher training curricula, books are presented as an ideal material for building and enriching young children's language. Yet, the routine of reading at home with children is hardly ever mentioned. In this chapter, the author proposes analyses of story-reading activities from a usage-based and first language acquisition perspective. The goal…

The present study looks into the largely unexplored territory of the cognitive underpinnings of semantic approximations in child language. The analysis of a corpus of 233 semantic approximations produced by 101 monolingual French-speaking children from 1;8 to 4;2 years of age leads to a classification of a significant number of them as instances…

Simultaneous bilingual education of a child is a dynamic process. Construction of linguistic competences undeniably depends on the conditions of the linguistic environment of the child. This education in a monolingual family, requires the practice of parenting tactics to increase the frequency of the language use in minority, during which,…

Using an observational task followed by an experimental task with an Intermodal Preferential Looking Paradigm, we examined the effect of input on children's acquisition of class extension rules by investigating the relationship between the amount of polysemous noun-verb pairs in French-speaking 2-year-olds' input and both their spontaneous…

Linguists use the concept of "diglossia" to describe any sociolinguistic situation where a low-prestige dialect coexists with a high-prestige one and these dialects are used in different social spheres. Recent observations on Reunion Island have challenged this view because people mix French and Creole extensively in the same utterance…

Numerous studies conducted in both the psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic fields have established that the parents' socio-economic status (SES) influences several aspects of children's language production. Moreover, a number of psycholinguistic studies strongly suggest that these differences are due in part to differences in the nature and the…

The present paper is concerned with the language development of two young children from two different families growing up exposed to three languages. The children live in Switzerland and have been exposed to English, French and Swiss German from infancy. The focus is on the children's production of these languages, and the contextual and affective…

In the linguistics field, liaison in French is interpreted as an indicator of interactions between the various levels of language organization. The current study examines the same issue while adopting a developmental perspective. Five experiments involving children aged two to six years provide evidence for a developmental scenario which…

The acquisition of reference involves both morphosyntax and pragmatics. This study investigates whether Dutch, English and French two- to three-year-old children differentiate in their use of determiners between non-specific/specific reference, newness/givenness in discourse and mutual/no mutual knowledge between interlocutors. A brief analysis of…

A discourse analysis of sixty French children aged ten to twelve from two socioeconomic groups. The object of the study was to describe the syntactic-semantic functioning of their language in an "abstract" situation and to determine the degree of influence of socio-cultural factors. (Text is in French.) (AMH)

Special issue devoted to research and the teaching of French in the elementary school. (VM)